Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation

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I get a feeling there must be some kind of agreement in place between them both, I can't imagine microsoft being that stupid as to be the only next gen console trying to restrict it's consumers.

If xbox one doesn't sort the huge question marks out I and many others have then I for one will make my mind up and change back to Sony.

1, I want clocks to get as high as tdp will allow,
2,i want to see a real demo of a cloud optimised game that makes a credible difference to not having it at all.
3,i want this used game malarkey explained fully and it not be totally restrictive.

If we get good answers to those questions, then I might consider an Xbone :)

I expect publishers to use Xbone's position as leverage against sony and the ps4 unless they can jump out to some huge market share lead early. After all, MS is giving pubs what they want in the first place.
 
If the arbitrary yield impact for a given TDP between say 1.6 GHz and 2.0 GHz for an 8-core Jaguar is .0000001, that is basically saying Jaguar can scale its clocks better than Bulldozer.




That would be what they're doing.
What else would they be setting the TDP for?

They may not be going for thermals, like you say this may just be down to yields only.
This makes a difference in the long run, I have no doubt with the cooling we have seen, the space in the box, the rumoured 220w external PSU, the retail components hitting the clocks speeds we are suggesting with ease... That it's more a matter of yields than it is thermals and power consumption.

Dont forget it is not just ps4 being 50% more compute power, it has rumoured double the rops and 64 compute threads, not to mention likely more system wide bandwidth.

I havnt even touched on the fact Xbone likely reserves 2 jaguar cores over ps4 rumoured 1, also 3gb ram compared 1 rumoured for ps4.

Its not hard to imagine Xbone running the same games at half the speed, maybe with some IQ turned down also.

That would enable ps4 to market itself as the world most power full console for years to come... The games visibly better.

As some have pointed out, consumer jaguar are binned for strict tdps as they have to be squashed in tablets and razor thin networks, they also can't be allowed to go to powerfull else it will deplete steamroller sales, so I don't thing they are comparable and I don't think k we can use anandtechs kabini preview as a basis for what a well cooled big black box plugged into the wall can achieve.
 
Any console that allows games to be installed and played without the disc will have some type of DRM as well, otherwise people will just buy the game and give it to all of their friends to install. Maybe another company will find a more consumer friendly solution, but I'm not sure what that would be. The easiest way may just be to force the user to keep the disc in the system even if the game is fully installed, like it is now on PS360. If you want discless play, there is going to be some kind of restriction. So before you get too upset at MS, I'd look at the rest of the industry and see if they don't follow suit. I'm assuming this is something the publishers have been asking for.


That's just it though, even assuming Sony follows through with every one of MS' policies (which I don't like) at least with ps4 the spec is better so fewer instances of choppy framerate or subHD games. Not to mention they seem to be more developer friendly along with their historically strong 1st/2nd party devs and an easy to code for platform to target.

With MS it's like a good-news / bad-news scenario where they said "ok do you want to hear the good news or the bad news first?" and then proceeded to say the bad news is that their policies are drm and privacy invasion heavy, but the "good" news is that they are only 33% behind in compute capabilities.

Like I said, the architecture is just too weak to support any negative policies.
 
You're fixating on TFLOP count, but you know that increasing the GPU clock would improve the performance of everything related to GPU performance except main memory bandwidth - but since it'd probably also improve the performance of eSRAM it'd scale pretty well.
The eSRAM would be affected by the clock speed in terms of power as well. The Jaguar cores half-clock the 2MB of their SRAM for power reasons. The activity level of the eSRAM is on the order of the L2s.


These numbers are completely arbitrary. Nobody knows what the actual impact to yield is, if 800MHz is really at any kind of inflection point. I've seen products where pretty much all of them will clock significantly higher than what they're shipped at without any problems. Initial specifications can be overly conservative. You can't know the exact manufacturing limits years in advance.
My pessimistic reading of the rumors concerning Durango's warm beta kits and the rumored downgrade in the various interconnect speeds for Orbis is that things went a little less than perfect.

Hell, let's look at your argument in reverse - if fusing off a couple CUs increases yields by 1% for Sony and no one cares anyway why shouldn't they do it? Because they already released specs? Guess they should have kept it open then, huh? But I don't think Sony agrees with you.
Taking things back after promising them has burnt Sony before.
That and fusing things off just because doesn't eliminate their die size contribution, which impacts the number of candidates for wafers and can hurt you with intra-die variation.

I suppose you also think that AMD wasted resources with their 1GHz edition discrete GPUs, which just featured a modest clock bump (much more modest than what we're considering here). Yes, I know it's not the same since those naturally come out of the binning, I'm not saying they're the same, but I am saying that if only a few hundred forum readers cared about THAT that it wouldn't have even been worth making the bin for.
The GPUs are priced much higher than the probable price Microsoft is paying for a console component. AMD's free to sell its cards and the PC platform takes care of the rest. It offers no software, no exclusives, no services, and no other features other than providing the GPU.

Then there's getting the 3dmark scores and benchmarks, which enough gamers care about in the PC space, apparently.
The nature of console comparisons is a little more sparse, and countless gamers go against the performance grain.

For the Xbox One, I'm more concerned by the alleged thicker API layer and complex memory setup than the incremental clock adjustment.

More than they respect them for being completely coy about specs, and certainly more than they'd respect them if they tried to outright pass off that the two consoles have basically the same capabilities when everyone in the gaming media is saying otherwise. But that seemed to be what you were suggesting they do.
Many of the people who care enough to have respect for such actions don't all pay money for respect, sadly. Way more people haven't a clue either way.
And until we see actual games with severe discrepancies, the functionality governed by core measures like ALU throughput and bandwidth can be considered equivalent.

I read the graphics comparison articles, but too many of the people I know don't see the difference. Too many other factors get in the way.

Do you have a source for this? I couldn't find anything.
I added an edit for that. I used too much certainty beyond the history of creating eventual salvage SKUs that don't register in western markets.

I don't think GF's 28nm is going to have anywhere close to the density of TSMC's, but Bonaire's die size fits in with the others exactly where you'd expect it to. The very idea that a refresh chip like this would be made on a different process would be mind boggling if not for AMD's massive obligation to GF.
That was poor wording on my part. My question is whether the console chips use GF's process versus the TSMC process used for Bonaire.

They may not be going for thermals, like you say this may just be down to yields only.
This is for parametric yields, not defect yields.
Functional chips that don't hit spec below the desired TDP get rejected. That's a bigger problem these days than defects.


Dont forget it is not just ps4 being 50% more compute power, it has rumoured double the rops and 64 compute threads, not to mention likely more system wide bandwidth.
The shared GDDR bus is a double-edged sword. It's way easier to thrash a DRAM bus in certain situations.
 
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Could it be the secret to their "very special relationship" with EA... strongarm them so the games look the same. (no, I'm not joking)
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-24-why-microsoft-wont-publish-psn-firsts
Microsoft is suggesting that anything but parity will result in them not carrying a title. They may think this is competitive, but it's not. They are killing any creative exposure of titles to make up for their own platform's shortcomings.
Wasn't much of an issue with PS3/360 except for bluray capacity, but this time it's going to be a mess if they do this again.
 
can they over clock the speed via firmware update or this needs to come out of the factory already overclocked? i am asking this for the simple fact that they probably don't want to be behind the competition in terms of power..
 
So , let's see.... they're behind in hardware , and now they're behind in tools too (the dev from Avalanche confirms it ) ?
What exactly all those people at MS do , drinking beers and eating pizza ?

I think you're putting far too much weight on one guys words
 
Could it be the secret to their "very special relationship" with EA... strongarm them so the games look the same. (no, I'm not joking)
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-24-why-microsoft-wont-publish-psn-firsts

Wasn't much of an issue with PS3/360 except for bluray capacity, but this time it's going to be a mess if they do this again.


Reason #99 to jump ship.

Weak specs are going to be very difficult to hide and devs may find it easier to ignore the platform if userbase growth doesn't perform as expected.

The only way I could see MS enforce this is to put frame rate caps and fixed resolution caps. I'm not sure how they can enforce this on a platform they don't own though. :???:
 
Could it be the secret to their "very special relationship" with EA... strongarm them so the games look the same. (no, I'm not joking)

By look the same you mean visually identical - same resolution? That'd never fly for games with dynamic resolution, they'd have to disallow that entirely.

This last generation was interesting, Sony and MS ending up with nearly equal shares for much of their lives was rather unprecedented. The equilibrium pushed back on software and made most things cross platform. But if the hardware sales don't balance out that software equilibrium could break and any side falling behind would have less room to make demands..
 
The five game states:

1) Running: The game is loaded in memory and is fully running. The game has full access to the reserved system resources, which are six CPU cores, 90 percent of GPU processing power, and 5 GB of memory. The game is rendering full-screen and the user can interact with it.

2) Constrained: The game is loaded in memory and is still running, but it has limited access to the system resources. The game is not rendering full screen in this state; it either is rendering to a reduced area of the screen or is not visible at all. The user cannot interact with the game in this state. System resource limits in this state are four CPUs, 5 GB of memory, and 45 percent of GPU power if the game is rendering to a reduced area of the screen, or 10 percent of GPU power if the game is not visible.

3) Suspended: The game is loaded in memory but is not running, meaning that the system has stopped scheduling all threads in the game process. The game has no access to CPUs or to the GPU processing power, but it still has the same 5 GB of memory reserved.

4) NotRunning: The game is not loaded in memory and is not running, and the system has no game-history information about the previous execution of the game. A game would be in NotRunning state in any of these three scenarios:

-The game has not been run since the console started.
-The game crashed during the last execution.
-The game did not properly handle the suspend process during the last execution and was forced to exit by the system.

5) Terminated: The game is not loaded in memory and is not running, which is identical to the NotRunning state in terms of system resource usage. Terminated state, however, indicates that during the last execution of the game, the game process was successfully suspended and then terminated by the system. This means that the game had a chance to save its state as it was suspended; the next time the game is activated, it can load this previous state data and continue the user experience from the same position. A game, for example, can start from the same level and position in the player’s last session without showing any front-end menu.

I like the sound of terminated. That allows for the per game resume we've been speculating about ever since interference started talking about the XBO using self contained VMs for games. I'm going to assume its writing its last state to the HDD (there's no where else safe to store it, I don't think). It would still have to read 5 GB from platter into memory but then you're right back in the action. Very nice. Not sure I understand the use case for the constrained state, though. I assume Apps have access to the Apps OS resources only (2 cores, 3 GB, 10% GPU) so there should be no need (or even possibility) for them to eat up more resources. But apparently its pulling an entire Jag Compute module and half the GPU for something (I can only presume the Apps OS).

EDIT

Ah, looks like constrained may be for snapping in live TV and Skype calls:

This week's Xbox One event made things even more clear, because Microsoft actually showed this happening. Specifically, they showed how an Xbox One gamer could momentarily stop playing a game to answer a Skype call or switch to live TV. The game seemed to be paused, but there's more to it than that. The game was, most likely, suspended.

Constrained makes more sense than suspended with the game still on screen and the other content snapped in.
 
I'm failing to understand the purpose of the constrained state if you cannot interact with the game? What is the point of leaving it running? Why not just suspend it instead? Kind of kills the idea of multitasking as well, if this is the state your game is put into when you run Skype at the same time, for example. I'd have to see an explanation of the usefulness of this.

The terminated state is nice. Basically a VM snapshot, I guess. You just resume, like you were playing a movie where you left off. No menus to jump through.
 
10% of the gpu being boxed off kind of makes all the talk about upping the clocks pointless as it be just getting back to where they started at this point.
 
I'm failing to understand the purpose of the constrained state if you cannot interact with the game? What is the point of leaving it running? Why not just suspend it instead?

Suppose you got a call from someone important, and you decided to expand the Skype call fullscreen.

You don't want to be kicked off a multiplayer server just because you decided to answer a Skype call, do you?
 
I'm failing to understand the purpose of the constrained state if you cannot interact with the game? What is the point of leaving it running? Why not just suspend it instead? Kind of kills the idea of multitasking as well, if this is the state your game is put into when you run Skype at the same time, for example. I'd have to see an explanation of the usefulness of this.

The terminated state is nice. Basically a VM snapshot, I guess. You just resume, like you were playing a movie where you left off. No menus to jump through.
Seem that constrained state is for when the game is running in the background doing something. Like you are watching TV while the game is matchmaking.
 
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