PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

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For those behind nanny walls, can you provide a little more than meh?


One week ago we published a detailed report about Durango, the next-gen Microsoft system. The company has built a powerful system, more than Wii U. Now, we would like to share with you the specs for Orbis, Sony’s alternative machine for the next-gen. After you gents and ladies.



LIVERPOOL SOC

Custom implementation of AMD Fusion APU Arquitecture (Accelerated Processing Unit)
Provides good performance with low power consumtion
Integrated CPU and GPU
Considerably bigger and more powerful than AMD’s other APUs


CPU:

Orbis contains eight Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz, arranged as two “clusters”
Each cluster contains 4 cores and a shared 2MB L2 cache
256-bit SIMD operations, 128-bit SIMD ALU
SSE up to SSE4, as well as Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)
One hardware thread per core
Decodes, executes and retires at up to two intructions/cycle
Out of order execution
Per-core dedicated L1-I and L1-D cache (32Kb each)
Two pipes per core yield 12,8 GFlops performance
102.4 GFlops for system


GPU:

GPU is based on AMD’s “R10XX” (Southern Islands) architecture
DirectX 11.1+ feature set
Liverpool is an enhanced version of the architecture
18 Compute Units (CUs)
Hardware balanced at 14 CUs
Shared 512 KB of read/write L2 cache
800 Mhz
1.843 Tflops, 922 GigaOps/s
Dual shader engines
18 texture units
8 Render backends


Memory:

4 GB unified system memory, 176 GB/s
3.5 available to games (estimate)


Storage:

- High speed Blu-ray drive

single layer (25 GB) or dual layer (50 GB) discs
Partial constant angular velocity (PCAV)
Outer half of disc 6x (27 MB/s)
Inner half varies, 3.3x to 6x


- Internal mass storage

One SKU at launch: 500 GB HDD
There may also be a Flash drive SKU in the future


Networking:

1 Gb/s Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WIFI, and Bluetooth


Peripherals:

Evolved Dualshock controller
Dual Camera
Move controller


Extra:

Audio Processor (ACP)
Video encode and decode (VCE/UVD) units
Display ScanOut Engine (DCE)
Zlib Decompression Hardware
There you go.
 
18 Texture units and 8 Rops? That's can't be right? Unless they're some super-custom, that's 1/4 of what's in a comparable desktop GPU.
 
One texture unit per CU doesn't make sense for GCN.
Are they dividing by four?

8 ROPs does seem small for the bandwidth in question.
 
what is Display ScanOut Engine (DCE) and Hardware balanced at 14 CUs ? and why did the speed of ram went down to 176gb/s and is it stacked ?
 
Related to 2 cameras?

Looking the new info it loooks like it is more like Durango specs, Am I wrong?

If in fact if 4 CUs are there for operating like GPGPU units, we should know the custom changes made to Durango to make a veredict. There must be something in Durango to make the GPGPU tasks, and if the GPU is HSA then, well...
 
One texture unit per CU doesn't make sense for GCN.
Are they dividing by four?

Most likely:

cu-block.jpg
 
If in fact 4 CUs are there for operating like GPGPU units, we should know the custom changes made to Durango to make a veredict, but just now, i am suspecting Durango could end up being a better and more future proof design.

What's interesting is that if the 4 CU's are dedicated to the CPU, why do they need texture units? Perhaps the scheduler always gives priority to the CPU for those resources, but otherwise they are just used for the GPU.
 
what is Display ScanOut Engine (DCE) and Hardware balanced at 14 CUs ? and why did the speed of ram went down to 176gb/s and is it stacked ?
The bin step of GDDR5 below 6Gbps is is 5.5Gbps and that fits with 176GB/s. Maybe they saved money to allow 4GB.
I'd love to know what they mean by "balanced".

I'm fascinated by the constant lack of info about the memory type.
 
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