Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [2018]

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Does anyone have a solid guess on the amount of performance increase from 2019-2020? If it's 10-20% then might as well push it to 2019, 40-50% however is kinda major and would be well worth the wait I say even if you get a one year head start.
A solid guess would be 10% assuming that a 2019 console would use TSMC 7nm, and that a 2020 console would use 7nm with EUV for critical layers. (According to plan in general. God knows if that will happen for their high performance variant as well although it seems reasonable to assume so.)
 
IMO it just means Microsoft is less picky about the GPU arch and they'll use whatever AMD has available at the time.
That's why Scorpio ended up with a Polaris GPU and Neo with a 2xFP16 arch closer to Vega.

At this point, Microsoft is probably stronger on the software front and Sony is more demanding on their hardware.
Microsoft could e.g. just get a Vega derivative iGPU whereas Sony demanded significantly more customizations, to the point of AMD calling it a new uarch.

In the end, I think it all boils down to the preferences of their 1st parties. Sony's ICE team could have lots of particular demands whereas Microsoft may just get more from raw power out of their hypervisor/virtual machine implementations.
Yeah, I think this is more likely than the belief MS is waiting for a post Navi architecture. And we should keep in mind AMD knows exactly how many more chips Sony has been ordering this gen than Microsoft which could factor in to any exclusivity deal. Given Sony’s expertise in both hardware and game engine design having that input into their design choices alone could be seen as incredibly valuable in their larger competition with Nvidia.
 
Does anyone have a solid guess on the amount of performance increase from 2019-2020? If it's 10-20% then might as well push it to 2019, 40-50% however is kinda major and would be well worth the wait I say even if you get a one year head start.
I don't think performance will be the catalyst, but rather price being too high in 2019.
 
I don't think performance will be the catalyst, but rather price being too high in 2019.

Yeah I'm thinking that would be the issue preventing 2019 release as well but then again how did Sony manage to release a 16nm PS4 Pro in 2016 @399? Wouldn't a 7nm console release in Fall 2019 be in the same position. Supposedly 7nm production is already being ramped up and this is a year and half out.
 
Yeah I'm thinking that would be the issue preventing 2019 release as well but then again how did Sony manage to release a 16nm PS4 Pro in 2016 @399? Wouldn't a 7nm console release in Fall 2019 be in the same position. Supposedly 7nm production is already being ramped up and this is a year and half out.
Costs for silicon is die size and yield. So comparing performance profiles of Pro and X we see less requirements on yield as they are about the same die size.
 
Costs for silicon is die size and yield. So comparing performance profiles of Pro and X we see less requirements on yield as they are about the same die size.
Less requirements on yield for Pro?

Right so a 2019 release will depend on how far Sony want's to push it with PS5. They could probably release a "safely clocked" chip in 2019 at a reasonable price.
 
Less requirements on yield for Pro?

Right so a 2019 release will depend on how far Sony want's to push it with PS5. They could probably release a "safely clocked" chip in 2019 at a reasonable price.
Yea it’s going to come down to clock speed for yield here. I didn’t know how to word it right at the time. Lower clock speeds means less requirements on the quality of the silicon.

Yields improve with process refinement. That’s where we are seeing the costs drop
over time.

If Sony sets the bar low they will go the whole gen with a low bar. There’s no issue here, just for those hoping for Sony to have a more powerful console need to ground themselves in reality.

The hardware triangle constraint is:
Price, Time, Performance.

Pretty similar to the project management constraints triangle of cost, time, quality.
 
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They don’t need a huge cpu and gpu,with infinity fabric, they can go 8 cpu cores not even highly clocked, a dedicated chip with neural network and stuffs to raytrace, and a mid range navi because they won’t need a lot of shader power (because of the dedicated raytracer) ....and a lot of ram
 
What is a dedicated neural nets and raytrace chip?

I think he meant Microsoft plans on expanding any AI related software/hardware integration on the network/server side of things, dealing with the Xbox platform. As for the "raytrace chip," I'm pretty sure he meant implementing raytracing features at the hardware level (GPU), rather than software.
 
Lets ground ourselves in reality again. Price is a big component here.

It’s already a stretch when I read 12-15 TF $399. 1080TI is 11TF for 699 and 11GB of memory.

There’s no way over the span of 1 year Sony is going to best it at nearly 1/2 Cost with more memory and a CPU ontop just because 7nm hit the market.

Then you look at ray tracing hardware which is only on Volta which is a level higher than a 1080TI. No way MS can put it all together like that.

Something has got to give and I know it won’t be the $399 price point.

Just not probable in the grand scheme of things.
 
Lets ground ourselves in reality again. Price is a big component here.

It’s already a stretch when I read 12-15 TF $399. 1080TI is 11TF for 699 and 11GB of memory.

There’s no way over the span of 1 year Sony is going to best it at nearly 1/2 Cost with more memory and a CPU ontop just because 7nm hit the market.

Then you look at ray tracing hardware which is only on Volta which is a level higher than a 1080TI. No way MS can put it all together like that.

Something has got to give and I know it won’t be the $399 price point.

Just not probable in the grand scheme of things.

I could see Sony just aim for 10TFlops on 7nm in 2019 @$399. It probably wouldn't require crazy clocks/cooling and "10Tflop GPU" and "$399" would be nice marketable words.
 
Something has got to give and I know it won’t be the $399 price point.

I don't think the holy grail $399 price point is going to be around during the launch of the next generation systems. $499 maybe the new $399 for Sony and Microsoft. If the technology and games are there, they should do fine at that price point.
 
Yeah anything like a dedicated raytracer is out of the question and not worth the effort. However I can see Sony launching two SKUs, the Base model 10-12tf at $399 and a Plus model 14-15tf at $499. They will still have a proper Pro mid gen fresh sometime later but the Plus model should counter or lessen the gap of whatever MS have should they release a more powerful Xbox a year later.
Point being there's absolutely no need to follow the traditional way of launching a new gen, time is changing and trend is changing so should your business strategy:).
 
i hope they'll have some dedicaced hardware for handling VR. if they can output games with the quality of TLOU and GoT at a good IQ VR games are will be wonderful.
 
It’s already a stretch when I read 12-15 TF $399. 1080TI is 11TF for 699 and 11GB of memory.

I don't think you can derive any cost/gigaflop metric from retail pricing given that there is no competitor to NVIDIA in the high end. They can charge what they do because they can.
 
Don't know that we should say custom RT hardware is a bad idea. Everyone ignores PowerVR because they featured in a mobile chipset no-one used and no software targeted, but it seems they achieved great things in tiny and efficient silicon. Truly custom RT hardware as opposed to hardware-assisted compute based RT may be a thing worth exploring.
 
I don't think you can derive any cost/gigaflop metric from retail pricing given that there is no competitor to NVIDIA in the high end. They can charge what they do because they can.
Though true, why would any GPU manufacturer provide a high-end part to a console if they can sell it to the high end PC and datacentre markets for far higher markups?
 
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