Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

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There is one point in it making sense.

Xbox TV .


Durango APU = Xbox TV
-------------------------------------
Durango APU x2 = Xbox high end console.

or

Durango APU + GPU = Xbox high end console.


If Durango does have the waternoose in it then you can even replace the xbox 360 with it and just ship a single sku that will be a media center extender + tv tunner + xbox 360 game machine and maybe even new games.


The real question is how would taking the high end Durango games and getting them to work on the low end. Could the high end simply run them at 1080p with better filtering and aa ? and then Durango base would run them at 720p with lower filtering and no aa ? Devs do it for the pc already


I doubt this rumor is true though

The February 2012 leaks had a System Priority Queue for the GPU, two of those really does't make much sense and it also doesn't lend itself to a second system GPU.
 
The leaked setup is 1 GPU / 1 CPU for Durango. I have yet to see anything aside from Yukon and a single patent that suggests otherwise.

Sure...but the patent is there to cover their legal claims to their architecture. You can't dismiss it so easily. And it is clearly meant specifically to cover their Yukon design(s).

The point I was making was that either their current architecture is covered in the variations described in the claims, or they have another patent out there (or waiting to be granted) that covers it. Seeing as we know a lot of that stuff DID carry over to current plans and the fact that we have some random guy claiming there is a dual SoC setup, maybe there is something to find in these patents.

If nothing else it makes for good discussion and investigation in the meantime. The conference he alluded to starts tomorrow and runs all week. The Durango stuff specifically won't be discussed until the 6th though iirc. Either way, don't expect a lot in terms of leaks. This is internal, by invitation only so ppl expecting lots of leaks are probably going to be disappointed. :/
 
16 GCN CU's aren't fitting in a 50W soc. So that doesn't fit. You can't pick and choose what parts of the document you want to accept.

You also misunderstood.

50W = SoC = Xbox 360 CPU/ARM (if applicable)/Xenos - At current process (45 nm) the Xbox 360 as a WHOLE draws about 85W

People have this unshakable urge to insist that the AMD parts for next gen will be an SoC from the start.

System power in the yukon leak also isn't for the whole console, but everything excluding the SoC. (from my understanding)

So the console in total is supposed to be ~170W by their projections in 2010.

Edit:

Actually as a correction: seems it would be jaguar/360 stuff on the SoC at 22nm... GPU is independent of the SoC at 28 nm

The system power figure makes sense as SoC + GPU. Whoops. ~50W for SoC. ~70W for GPU

This would also explain why the Durango GPU sits on the southbridge as opposed to the northbridge, because the northbridge is on the SoC/SOI (unlike on the Xbox 360)
 
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You also misunderstood.

50W = SoC = Xbox 360 CPU/ARM (if applicable)/Xenos - At current process (45 nm) the Xbox 360 as a WHOLE draws about 85W

People have this unshakable urge to insist that the AMD parts for next gen will be an SoC from the start.

System power in the yukon leak also isn't for the whole console, but everything excluding the SoC. (from my understanding)

So the console in total is supposed to be ~170W by their projections in 2010.

....

It really sounds like you're just trying to make it fit with your own expectations.

They have ARM cores attached to what you claim is xenos (system?), 3xPPC is elsewhere.
I'd hope the 360 soc would be less than 50W on 28nm.
 
Why would they replicate the whole 360 though ? Shouldn't waternoose + the new apu be enough to run 360 games ?
 
The question is , where do they shove waternoose ?

Put it with the Jag cores, Have it share bandwidth with the jaguar cores, you won't be using all 8 if you're running BC and you wont be using waternoose if you're not. Not sure about the engineering difficulties that would impose.
 
Why would they replicate the whole 360 though ? Shouldn't waternoose + the new apu be enough to run 360 games ?

Just out of curiosity, how would they even be able to replicate the EDram (with logic) on the new GPU since they went with ESRam? The speed and size isn't the problem, its strictly the logic.
 
As a developer that would be the elegant solution, no?

You don't have to worry about shared resources and from a user perspective, your OS experience is never degraded regardless of what game you're playing.

Well, devs don't need to worry about this at the moment, since apparently games run in a VM and can only see a 6 core, 5 GB RAM machine.

It's an even more elegant solution than an OS APU ;)

....

And I must have missed something, why is everyone taking quite seriously a new poster who's first post is to claim MS are now going for TWO APUs with Durango?
For all we know it could just be one of misterxmedia/alexcteam/jeffrigby's disciples - multiple APUs (codenamed Mars, Venus, Uranus etc) are their stock in trade when it comes to Durango.

If we're going to do that we might as well take at face value Proelite/Aegies etc. suggestions that the final GPU will have the power of a GTX680 and 7970 - at least they're considered insiders.
 
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What off the shelf APU are you thinking of? Trinity isn't even GCN, Richland and Kabini aren't out yet. More to the point.. AMD's SKUs for consumer products don't align well with what Sony and MS would prefer for a game console. Hence why they're using a large number of relatively weak Jaguar cores instead of a smaller number of high clocked Piledrivers, because this is a better way to spend their power budget.
My lack of knowledge of PC parts kinda blows that idea out the water. ;) Is there no (upcoming GCN) high-end APU for laptops that's low-power with a decent number of CUs? Like Kaveri (Googling). MS needn't have invested in custom engineering and could have bought binned parts cheap, sticking two together, although I suppose when MS were designing Durango, that may not have been a consideration.
 
My honest appraisal is that I doubt the idea of a two APU SKU unless Microsoft goes crazy and designs two levels of consoles with a substantial price delta between the two.

P.S. I'm sorry that this post is sort of businessy. I just feel that a single post along these lines could be of benefit to this discussion. Feel free to move this post mods if you're not happy with what I've done here.
I think this thread should stick to discussing a single Durango box until we hear about multiple SKUs, otherwise there's an awful lot of non-hardware business speculation needed.
 
Exophase, Richland has been shipping for some time to OEMs already.
http://www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd_unveils_new_apus.aspx

I knew someone would respond with this :/

When I said it's not out (and it's not, shipped to OEMs doesn't constitute, I meant literally available "off the shelf") I really just wanted to clarify that I had no idea what part he was thinking of. Of course I didn't think that a console launching in several months couldn't use dual off the shelf APUs.

Another reason why this wouldn't work is there's no coherency interconnect available on them and no one in their right mind would make a multi-chip system w/o that.
 
I've a feeling there are two schools of thought as to what constitutes speculation in this thread a) reasonable assumptions based on reliable leaks and extrapolations from there b) fanboy led nonsense that ignores the reality of production schedules, economic viability and developer support. In case you can't guess I prefer type a.

Doubling the putative Durango spec to 16 cores or going for a dual APU/mainboard/GPU strategy is pure pie-in-the-sky nonsense. Any of these changes would require communication with devs well in advance of now for the software to work right/at all. A dual sku strategy fragments your user base from Day 1 and is even worse than the situation devs complained about with the hdd in the 360. Imagine if I have to code my game to work in a scenario where I may have 50% of the cpu budget (let alone GPU)? Madness, pure madness.

Durango from all the rumors thus far seems to be a capable console that will focus on leveraging the value adds from XBox Live and a low BOM to compete w/Sony. I wonder if we'd still have had all these 'rumors' if the Sony reveal had only 4GB? I'm willing to guess we'd have seen far fewer duct tape rumours and more addressing the interesting aspects of Durango (DME, Kinect 2 et al)
 
I have to stop reading these threads. Any random person can jump in and start a rumour, and then it devolves into comparisons between Sega Saturn and PS1.
 
Not saying I believe the guy, but it surely is interesting that he mentioned 6th of March considering MS is having internal Xbox meeting (it leaked yesterday).
 
I thought the schedule was leaked last week for that meeting?

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