D
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IMO, with HBCC being transparent to the software developer, there's really no need to go with UMA anymore. If devs don't have to manually manage RAM allocation, the consoles can have again a small+fast memory for high-bandwidth/low-latency and a large+slow pool of memory. Just have the cake and eat it too.
So instead of breaking the bank with 32GB of GDDR6, I expect consoles to have 6-8GB of HBM at 500-600GB/s and 24-32GB of DDR4 or LPDDR4 at ~50GB/s (128bit 3200MT/s). Fabs are closing down GDDR production lines to make way for more DDR and LPDDR lines, so lots of GDDR6 might turn out substantially more expensive than previously thought.
I'm not expecting memory bandwidth requirements to balloon as much as some may think. If XBoneX's 320GB/s seems balanced for a pre-DSBR GPU, 500-600GB/s could be more than sufficient for a "high-bandwidth cache" that targets 4K in a post-Vega architecture. If Samsung's roadmap is anything to go by, this could be done with 3 stacks of 2-Hi HBM Low-Cost (6GB) or a single stack of 4-Hi HBM3, whichever ends up the cheaper option.
At the same time, I also expect them to do away with L3 cache for the CPU cores, as coherency could all be done through HBM/HBC.
Perhaps the after-the-next generation can come back to UMA again with tiny PCB footprints using HBM only, but in 2020 it should still be too costly to go with HBM alone.
Same thing with hard drive. Unfortunately (and perhaps artificially), solid state memory has halted its path to lower price-per-GB, so I also expect a 2-tier solution here. I think the consoles will have ~64GB of NVMe storage (M.2 or even soldered) and a 2TB+ SATA3 HDD. The PCI-Express storage would be non-user accessible but the OS would try to detect which game or games are being accessed more frequently and automatically transfer those to the NVMe drive.
I hope I'm wrong and 2020 will have super-cheap 2TB NVMe SSDs, though..
How much weight next-gen consoles will be putting into VR is up to debate, but MSAA is important for VR. At least it is for Valve if they're taking a break from making hats and are actually making those "3 full VR games" that Gabe Newell said they were.
EDIT:
Oh and USB-C everywhere, at least 2 ports on the front and another 2 on the back of each console. The ones on the front can be 3.1 Gen1 for gamepads and the ones on the back should be 3.1 Gen3 to use with external storage devices.
So instead of breaking the bank with 32GB of GDDR6, I expect consoles to have 6-8GB of HBM at 500-600GB/s and 24-32GB of DDR4 or LPDDR4 at ~50GB/s (128bit 3200MT/s). Fabs are closing down GDDR production lines to make way for more DDR and LPDDR lines, so lots of GDDR6 might turn out substantially more expensive than previously thought.
I'm not expecting memory bandwidth requirements to balloon as much as some may think. If XBoneX's 320GB/s seems balanced for a pre-DSBR GPU, 500-600GB/s could be more than sufficient for a "high-bandwidth cache" that targets 4K in a post-Vega architecture. If Samsung's roadmap is anything to go by, this could be done with 3 stacks of 2-Hi HBM Low-Cost (6GB) or a single stack of 4-Hi HBM3, whichever ends up the cheaper option.
At the same time, I also expect them to do away with L3 cache for the CPU cores, as coherency could all be done through HBM/HBC.
Perhaps the after-the-next generation can come back to UMA again with tiny PCB footprints using HBM only, but in 2020 it should still be too costly to go with HBM alone.
Same thing with hard drive. Unfortunately (and perhaps artificially), solid state memory has halted its path to lower price-per-GB, so I also expect a 2-tier solution here. I think the consoles will have ~64GB of NVMe storage (M.2 or even soldered) and a 2TB+ SATA3 HDD. The PCI-Express storage would be non-user accessible but the OS would try to detect which game or games are being accessed more frequently and automatically transfer those to the NVMe drive.
I hope I'm wrong and 2020 will have super-cheap 2TB NVMe SSDs, though..
MSAA is also a VR thing..
How much weight next-gen consoles will be putting into VR is up to debate, but MSAA is important for VR. At least it is for Valve if they're taking a break from making hats and are actually making those "3 full VR games" that Gabe Newell said they were.
EDIT:
Oh and USB-C everywhere, at least 2 ports on the front and another 2 on the back of each console. The ones on the front can be 3.1 Gen1 for gamepads and the ones on the back should be 3.1 Gen3 to use with external storage devices.
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If you are using 128 GBs flash, buy a 128 GB SSD and run it alongside your HDD. SSHD's have a small amount of cache because it's the optimal balance between cost and performance benefit for caching the HDD. Bare in mind everything written to cache has to be written to HDD to, so you're limiting performance. It's only there for faster reads. There's no cross-over in components so you don't save anything fusing the two discrete devices into one package.
