Do ACE units effect power?

TomRL

Newcomer
So I've been told that ACE units will give PS4 yet another edge in power. But I thought they only make compute management easier, not more powerful.
 
From what we've been told, pretty much.
The ACEs are responsible for monitoring queues and starting the launch process of a kernel.
They don't perform the activities most people use to define computational power.

Since such a large part of computation is the utilization of compute resources, better control and coordination can make existing resources more useful, or larger resource pools practical to use.
 
Yeah, they don't increase the total theoretical power, but ideally they reduce wasted cycles so you get closer to using that maximum than you would without.
 
They contribute in a significant way only when the problem size is small, there is a concurrency of small tasks and/or you have a complex job graph that may rely on GPU self-enqueuing. But if it is just normal big batch problems, I hold my little doubt.
 
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Presumably it primarily depends on how much games take advantage of GPU compute. I assume most if not all games available at the moment make only basic use (at best) of the GPU's compute capabilities and thus the 2 ACE's in the One are just as up to the task as the 8 in the PS4. However if as noted above they start to make much more fine grained use of compute then the PS4 may pull ahead in efficiency.

But is it reasonable to expect games to have that many small compute tasks running on a regular basis?
 
Yes, I think last gen, especially looking at how SPEs have been employed, proves that is a reasonable expectation.
 
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