Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [pre E3 2019]

[Love_In_Rio]

Unless it's 8 TFlops plus additional hardware on the side like a ray-tracing engine.

Or two 8 tflops GPU chiplets...

 

[MrFox]

We've sort of discussed this in the other thread, but it comes down to what's needed for a client/end-user, so RT is seemingly in, but not the AI part i.e. training/tensor, and I thought the consensus we reached was that the latter was more or less ideally done in the cloud i.e. not necessary for gaming hardware to do, and maybe coincidentally, BF5 is our writing-on-the-wall test case for implementing RT without using tensor anyway. *ahem*

It'll be curious to see, but I imagine it would be an RT unit (whatever that may be ????) per CU or a group of CUs like how nV has an RT per SM - so maybe it ends up as one RT block per group of CUs, which in Polaris is up to 3 CUs with shared L1 as opposed to the max of 4 in the rest of GCN (including Fiji/Vega I assume).

Wonder if they'd be inclined to go down to 2 CUs per L1 grouping (or @3dilettante can bust my hypotheticals :V )

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"confirmed" SSD storage ought to be nice.

I was under the impression real time RT requires deep learning to filter a sparse number of rays. Is this still the case?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Denoising doesn't need to use ML.

 

[iroboto]

I was under the impression real time RT requires deep learning to filter a sparse number of rays. Is this still the case?

We have yet to see real time denoising using ML. We won’t see any ML based techniques that are built into the renderpipeline without DirectML if I understand correctly.

 

[Ike Turner]

We have yet to see real time denoising using ML. We won’t see any ML based techniques that are built into the renderpipeline without DirectML if I understand correctly.

IIRC Star Wars reflections demo, Remedy's demo, Porsche demo & Project SOL (Nvidia tech demo) all use RTX/OptiX for Denoising.

 

[iroboto]

IIRC Star Wars reflections demo, Remedy's demo, Porsche demo & Project SOL (Nvidia tech demo) all use RTX/OptiX for Denoising.

Link that it’s ML based denoising? They are certainly using denoising though. Optix uses ML but not fast enough for game purposes IIRC.

It is possible they use DirectML, because there are unofficial release versions for programming. But we won’t see it in game until the windows patch comes out with DirectML.

 

[Ike Turner]

Link that it’s ML based denoising? They are certainly using denoising though. Optix uses ML but not fast enough for game purposes IIRC.

It is possible they use DirectML, because there are unofficial release versions for programming. But we won’t see it in game until the windows patch comes out with DirectML.

OptiX Denoising is always ML. It's running on the Tensor Cores through CUDA (no need for DirectML in their case). The number of rays is so low that the Tensor Cores are enough to hit 25/30Fps @ 1080P.

 

[iroboto]

OptiX Denoising is always ML. It's running on the Tensor Cores through CUDA (no need for DirectML in their case). The number of rays is so low that the Tensor Cores are enough to hit 25/30Fps @ 1080P.

Yea using CUDA I can see that happening.

 

[Metal_Spirit]

Or two 8 tflops GPU chiplets...

Doubtful. Amd is using monolithic GPUs because of performance loss.

 

[mpg1]

Yeah I mean all of these leaks seem possible but also have red flags in the way it's worded. Like for instance "1TB NVMe SSD @ 1+GB/s". First of all is 1+GB/s referring to read speed? because that seems slow for NVMe. Also do you really think these consoles would have a PCIe slot? Wouldn't it be more likely to just have the flash memory soldered to the board? And in that case "1TB of flash storage" would be a much more believable wording. Otherwise it just sounds like people taking PC parts wish-list and pretending they are in the know.

 

[AlNom]

First of all is 1+GB/s referring to read speed? because that seems slow for NVMe. Also do you really think these consoles would have a PCIe slot?

All depends on the northbridge - PCIe could just refer to the link technology rather than the physical expansion ports, so they'd maybe opt for a couple lanes instead to optimize for the SSD performance that is reasonably affordable.

Why would 1GB/s be too slow for reading (compared to conventional HDD) It'd be about an order of magnitude faster than what consoles are accustomed to seeing. On PCI-E 3.0, that seems to be equivalent to 1x -> 18 pins/wires (correct me if I'm wrong, just kinda parsing)

 

[mpg1]

All depends on the northbridge - PCIe could just refer to the link technology rather than the physical expansion ports, so they'd maybe opt for a couple lanes instead to optimize for the SSD performance that is reasonably affordable.

Why would 1GB/s be too slow for reading (compared to conventional HDD) Almost an order of magnitude faster than what consoles are accustomed to.

On PCI-E 3.0, that seems to be equivalent to 1x -> 18 pins/wires (correct me if I'm wrong, just kinda parsing)

Don't NVMe's get like 2.5GB/s read speeds...

 

[AlNom]

Don't NVMe's get like 2.5GB/s read speeds...

They also cost more. In the context of consoles, it seems like that'd be a reasonable trade-off.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

One can come up with possibilities for plenty of ideas. eg. Why PCIe? Could be a proprietary cart format plugging into a port, with sales of replacement storage coming with a tasty console-specific markup.

 

[McHuj]

I don't think leaks come from the engineers working on the designs. More likely its from people who got a glimpse of the spec and don't understand fully or misinterpret the information.

NVMe is just an interface. This could be a custom drive simply using the NVMe interface. But by keeping the interface NVMe allows the end user to upgrade it.

A 1GB/sec would be a huge increase over current drive speeds. It still slower than consumer NVMe drives which are in the ballpark of 3+ GB/sec. The lower speed makes it seem more believable to me. It implies some lower cost solution.

 

[bgroovy]

The connector could be custom, but why wouldn't you use PCIe as the underlying electronic standard? No reason to reinvent the wheel.

EDIT: Also, the number of PCIe lanes used by NVMe drives can be variable. 1GBps is plausible for a 2 lane configuration.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Like for instance "1TB NVMe SSD @ 1+GB/s". First of all is 1+GB/s referring to read speed? because that seems slow for NVMe.

It would look like they're using one of those low-cost/low-power DRAM-less Phison controllers that use 2 lanes PCIe 3.0.
1 GB/s consistent throughput with solid state latencies would be a huge improvement over the SATA 3 HDDs we find in current consoles.

And if the consoles use a regular PCIe 4x connector+bus, there's still a substantial upgrade path for enthusiasts and/or future console revisions.

Also do you really think these consoles would have a PCIe slot?

They currently have SATA connectors, so why couldn't they transition to NVMe?

Wouldn't it be more likely to just have the flash memory soldered to the board?

Considering Microsoft and Sony have had replaceable storage for two and a half console generations? No.

 

[mpg1]

It would look like they're using one of those low-cost/low-power DRAM-less Phison controllers that use 2 lanes PCIe 3.0.
1 GB/s consistent throughput with solid state latencies would be a huge improvement over the SATA 3 HDDs we find in current consoles.

And if the consoles use a regular PCIe 4x connector+bus, there's still a substantial upgrade path for enthusiasts and/or future console revisions.


They currently have SATA connectors, so why couldn't they transition to NVMe?



Considering Microsoft and Sony have had replaceable storage for two and a half console generations? No.

Well they have SATA connections because they use mechanical drives..which can't be "embedded" into the board like flash memory can..and I would not consider Xbox One as having replaceable storage.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Well they have SATA connections because they use mechanical drives....

Then it's only logical that they'll use NVMe connections if the new gens use sold state drives, otherwise they'd be limited by the bus.

and I would not consider Xbox One as having replaceable storage.

What the..? Wow you're right!
Geez wtf went over their heads this time? That thing was made hard by design!

 

[mpg1]

Then it's only logical that they'll use NVMe connections if the new gens use sold state drives, otherwise they'd be limited by the bus.

Sony might but I could see Microsoft just stick the flash right on the board and emphasize external drives again.