Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [2018]

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Maybe we could speculate on some innovative new button tech to give this share button tangent "a technical spin".
 
When it comes to console with only so many buttons on a controller it's quite the innovation. Considering how big streaming has become Sony was forward thinking with PS4 when it came to the social aspect.
you realize that MS had the same thing at launch through Kinect voice controls ? You wouldn't even need to go into a menu with a long press. Just say xbox record that , xbox share that. Now that's quite the innovation and now amazon and google sell tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of voice assistant products.

Anyway I doubt this conversation will continue any further. My point still stands that while Kinect did not do well on the xbox one to say its feature set hasn't been adopted and beomce industry standards is a big ridiculous

Would you stop moving the bloody goalposts?

You were wrong about something completely trivial and unimportant, accept it. It happens to us all.
I haven't moved anything. The point of something becoming an industry standard vs another thing stands.
 
I haven't moved anything. The point of something becoming an industry standard vs another thing stands.

Bollocks. You said the Switch didn't have a share button, then went on to describe its share button. When that was pointed out to you, you stated that your PC can do that, so it's not an innovation. Now, you're saying you're not moving the goalposts and it's a matter of what's industry standard.

The Switch has a share button. It's likely there because it's turned out to be a handy feature of the DualShock 4. It'll probably be in the next XBox controller. If so, it'll be a console industry standard.

As for innovative, that debate's been raging ever since the Wii. It wasn't the first device to use motion controls, but it was the first mainstream device. Is that innovation?

The exact same can be said about Kinect.

Personally, I think it's a pretty pointless debate for pedants and I see each of the three topics as follows:
- Nintendo were the first to popularise motion controls, and the industry's better for it.
- Microsoft were the first to implement accurate voice controls on a mass scale, and other industries have followed suit.
- Sony were the first to put a screenshot/video capture button on their controller. Nintendo have adopted it, and MS probably will do to.

Any chance we can just leave it there? There are plenty of other forums for fanboy wars.
 
Fixed function buttons in the center have been a little flaw of controllers forever. Used to be Start and Select, both were used for whatever unrelated to either starting or selecting.

I think what we need is dynamic labelling on buttons in the center. The touch pad on ds4 was an incomplete attempt, it ended up a big button for menu/inventory/map. It needed a display to have delimited areas. Not sure what game devs want here.

The PS button and Share button are always active and system level, so it's logical they are fixed function. Dedicated share button is now practically industry standard, in the sense that it's on over 80% of consoles being sold right now. No doubt MS will add it next gen. The Home/System/PS button is now 100% standard, but that was a natural addition as soon as consoles had an elaborate system OS, it obviously needed a dedicated system menu button.
 
On PS controllers, generic buttons in the centre could be labelled with letters, A and B, or solid colour buttons like XB's black and white - yellow is definitely available. I guess on XBox et al they could use circles and triangles. ;) Dynamic labelling is overkill unless you have a proper, actually-used second screen. In fact I'd say dynamically labelled buttons is poorer ergonomics, as every game you'd have to look at the controller to see what button's what. Standard buttons lets you know without looking once trained on placement.
 
One of the biggest let down for me this was was the amount of resources used(wasted) for the OS features.
Percentage wise it was a lot on both CPU and RAM sides.

I hope it's not going to happen again.

Yes I want a better faster interface and multimedia functionalities but I don't need it to be bloated with crap.

Xbox One X is handling everything in 4K and I don't think that many more resources are needed.
 
They will not only leave more resources for user-accessible OS apps, but also for background tasks such as 4K60 DVR.

Because of this, I hope that PS5 will have a repeat of the side-DDR3 ram that Pro has introduced. They should slap 4GB stack of DDR3 on the mobo for OS and leave almost all of the fast GDDR for games.
 
Bollocks. You said the Switch didn't have a share button, then went on to describe its share button. When that was pointed out to you, you stated that your PC can do that, so it's not an innovation. Now, you're saying you're not moving the goalposts and it's a matter of what's industry standard.

The Switch has a share button. It's likely there because it's turned out to be a handy feature of the DualShock 4. It'll probably be in the next XBox controller. If so, it'll be a console industry standard.

As for innovative, that debate's been raging ever since the Wii. It wasn't the first device to use motion controls, but it was the first mainstream device. Is that innovation?

The exact same can be said about Kinect.

Personally, I think it's a pretty pointless debate for pedants and I see each of the three topics as follows:
- Nintendo were the first to popularise motion controls, and the industry's better for it.
- Microsoft were the first to implement accurate voice controls on a mass scale, and other industries have followed suit.
- Sony were the first to put a screenshot/video capture button on their controller. Nintendo have adopted it, and MS probably will do to.

Any chance we can just leave it there? There are plenty of other forums for fanboy wars.

The switch doesn't have a share button. You can take a picture or record video. Then you need to exit the game and go to your library to share something. A share button would share whatever you wanted . I mean its in the name share button. Not picture button , not video recording button. But Share button.

And with that I exit the conversation because its simply not going anywhere
 
On the subject of sharing I think Sonys game share feature was a pretty great idea - as an example of it's use I played splitscreen Battlefront with my daughter while she was living ~40 miles away and didn't own the game.

Fixed function buttons in the center have been a little flaw of controllers forever. Used to be Start and Select, both were used for whatever unrelated to either starting or selecting.

I think what we need is dynamic labelling on buttons in the center. The touch pad on ds4 was an incomplete attempt, it ended up a big button for menu/inventory/map. It needed a display to have delimited areas. Not sure what game devs want here.

The PS button and Share button are always active and system level, so it's logical they are fixed function. Dedicated share button is now practically industry standard, in the sense that it's on over 80% of consoles being sold right now. No doubt MS will add it next gen. The Home/System/PS button is now 100% standard, but that was a natural addition as soon as consoles had an elaborate system OS, it obviously needed a dedicated system menu button.

Maybe this is why we keep seeing mention of a DS with a screen in the middle...maybe it'll be programmable labelled buttons?
 
Maybe this is why we keep seeing mention of a DS with a screen in the middle...maybe it'll be programmable labelled buttons?
From patents it looks like they considered a small screen on the ds4 touchpad, but eventually decided not to.

It would need to be a really cheap one, just a passive matrix plastic oled 96x64 enough for 4 or 6 icons. Not to look at it while gaming but just to see the more complex controls available before learning them by heart. And it enable poker games and board games in couch multiplayer.

Still it's the kind of things a few games would use well and end up a waste of money. Like the touch pad really. I'm hoping for it just because it would look cool, I'm not an investor I don't care if they lose a bit of money.:nope:
 
New video from Jim. The key takeaway is that IO die are NOT for consumer products. We should expect a monolithic console APU.

Also interesting that Vega 7nm was planned but scrapped for consumers. That speaks pretty highly of Navi IMO.

It also provides a lot of explanation of the 7nm scaling factors (2x power efficiency at same clocks, or 1.25X at same power).


Edit: rather than double post, I’ll add this little Zen 2 tidbit. Recent LLVM update allows granularity in AVX512 architecture targeting. Reviewers are Intel compiler engineer, Apple compiler engineer, and RKSimon, Sony’s SN Systems compiler engineer. A Polish developer with ties to FreeBSD is listed as a subscriber. At this point, I’ll be surprised if Zen 2 doesn’t have AVX512 support. I believe it will be up to Skylake, based on others that I have seen.
https://reviews.llvm.org/D55603
 
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New video from Jim. The key takeaway is that IO die are NOT for consumer products. We should expect a monolithic console APU.]
Consoles and desktops have different needs. A small desktop IO die with a narrow DDR4 controller and modest number PCI-E lanes may not be worth it. But when you have a large, 7nm GPU die with a 256-bit GDDR6 controller, you may want to keep its size down with a separate Zen 2 chiplet. There would be no downside besides packaging costs, and I suspect those would be outweighed by the savings of binning both sides independently.
 
Consoles and desktops have different needs. A small desktop IO die with a narrow DDR4 controller and modest number PCI-E lanes may not be worth it. But when you have a large, 7nm GPU die with a 256-bit GDDR6 controller, you may want to keep its size down with a separate Zen 2 chiplet. There would be no downside besides packaging costs, and I suspect those would be outweighed by the savings of binning both sides independently.
Consoles may need well north of 500GB/s bandwidth, and we don’t know that it would be practical to deliver with an IO die.
 
256 bit may not be enough. Is it practical to move CPUs off die to save 70 mm^2?
Depends on the yield curve of larger dies and the packaging costs, which I don't know. they'll already be cranking out the CPU chiplets so I can't dismiss the possibility. As for the memory interface, who knows. 24GB and 384-bit would be nice but at what cost?
 
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