Bloomberg on PS5 yields, orders, and price ranges [2020-09-14]

[eastmen]

Doesn't the power-shift profile only engage when the game isn't fully utilizing the GPU and/or CPU at a given instance. Thus, delivering the additional power to either the GPU or CPU when need be. Which seems like a smart power savings and thermal design decision.

he talks at 33mins or so .

When you listen to them you hear them talk about power and heat because of course thats the by product of power. You can hear them talk about designing for worse case senarios through the life of the ps5. THen you get to them talking about running the cpu and gpu in variable frequency = continuous boost . Doing this they provide a generous amount of power which maxes out the cooling capability. He goes on to say that basing it on thermal load doesn't work , basing it on power does and after that they send any unused power from the cpu to gpu. He says when the worse case game comes it will be reduced but just a minor clock speed drop. They never say how much

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say based on the ps5 size that cooling is still an important part of the ps5 hitting its clock speeds. If you put chips that require more power your going to end up hitting the thermal limits of the console and the power limits of the power supply much quicker. Which means it will only run at max frequency when doing relatively minor tasks.

So IMO if they need to use lower quality APUs they will need to run more power through them to hit the same speed and if this is something that happened after power supplies were already designed and purchased there isn't much they can do aside from allow power-shift to happen more often.

But of course thats if they were going to add in worse dies.

I think it be bad move by sony. If this rumor about production issues is true it will hurt them , esp if ms can flood the market with xss and xsx as parents will need to buy little jimmy and kimmy christmas gives and if xbox is the only game in town that is what they will end up with. But it still sounds like sony will be able to provide a lot of units. But if they end up with a system with power issues , huge size and may sometimes have issues running next gen games at a high enough resolution or the same amount of ray tracing and other stuff as MS's consoles they will be in trouble. We also don't know the prices. This report is saying $400 and $500 that could be true . But if its $450 and $500 or $550 or even $500/$600 it could really hurt sony in the long run.

Oh well i have to say this is all really entertaining. I have the geforce vs radeon in the pc world right now and the ps5 vs xss vs xsx on the console side. So much fun speculation

 

[eastmen]

You made it as though Sony has pulled a fast one on us!
This 50% yield and hefty drop in production, there may be some truths inside all the smokes and mirrors.
I don't remember TSMC 7nm having such poor output, in PC space.

How can one goes about testing PS5 game clock speeds to get the final say?

what would be the fast one ? All companies drop bad news on Friday nights. Its one of the oldest pr tricks in the book. Also Sony already told us that the console runs at continous boost and will downclock when it has to so it can maintain its power usage and thermal load. I linked to the video

As for TSMC 7nm having poor output. Its not so much that but its more the fact that with the shut down TSMC is booked solid . I wouldn't know where Sony or MS would find more Wafer starts on their lines. Its rumored that even Intel was sol when trying to get wafer starts

I guess the 8 to 10 TF will be seldom used (at least in the beg/launch titles)....

LIke i said in my post , the easiest way for a dev to take advantage of 3 diffrent skus plus computers would be to use dynamic scaling. You have the xss at the low end. I'm pretty sure that is what devs will develop for. You then add in better textures for the ps5 and xsx editions and let dynamic resolution do the rest of the work. Maybe some effects would need to be less on the xss and scaled up for the other two platforms

I honestly think it was a brilliant play by MS because now they are insuring they have a console with the most dev resources getting poured into it with the xss and then the high end that will most likely look the best at the same time. Sony will be in the middle of that

 

[Picao84]

i wouldn't go that far.

I'm just buying a new video card. The majority of these games will be on my pc anyway

Same, given that XSX doesn't support VR.

 

[eastmen]

Same, given that XSX doesn't support VR.

yea and wait to you see what a crazy vr year we are entering

 

[Picao84]

yea and wait to you see what a crazy vr year we are entering

Interesting...

 

[HBRU]

what would be the fast one ? All companies drop bad news on Friday nights. Its one of the oldest pr tricks in the book. Also Sony already told us that the console runs at continous boost and will downclock when it has to so it can maintain its power usage and thermal load. I linked to the video

As for TSMC 7nm having poor output. Its not so much that but its more the fact that with the shut down TSMC is booked solid . I wouldn't know where Sony or MS would find more Wafer starts on their lines. Its rumored that even Intel was sol when trying to get wafer starts



LIke i said in my post , the easiest way for a dev to take advantage of 3 diffrent skus plus computers would be to use dynamic scaling. You have the xss at the low end. I'm pretty sure that is what devs will develop for. You then add in better textures for the ps5 and xsx editions and let dynamic resolution do the rest of the work. Maybe some effects would need to be less on the xss and scaled up for the other two platforms

I honestly think it was a brilliant play by MS because now they are insuring they have a console with the most dev resources getting poured into it with the xss and then the high end that will most likely look the best at the same time. Sony will be in the middle of that

I think MS somehow helped Sony with the XSS launch. Games will be designed with built-in scalable design that fits with the weird power/frequency management of ps5... The funny will be to compare XSS to PS5 performances... [emoji1]. That's why I think the ps5de will be at 399 (but almost impossible to find at the beginning) and the regular ps5 will be 549.

 

[Rurouni]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say based on the ps5 size that cooling is still an important part of the ps5 hitting its clock speeds. If you put chips that require more power your going to end up hitting the thermal limits of the console and the power limits of the power supply much quicker. Which means it will only run at max frequency when doing relatively minor tasks.

What is minor tasks? I can game on my PC at its max clock while the temp is still okay but once I run furmark, well, the fans working at max rpm and the temp is still higher than normal gaming.
I can run 3d render using coronarenderer comfortably but when using prime95 with AVX, well, I prefer not to make my PC run prime95 for too long.
I don't think both task should be counted as minor since both are real world situation (for GPU and CPU) but running furmark and prime95 is not. Of course it doesn't mean PS5 will only downclock when running a power virus, but what I'm saying is that there are examples of real word non minor task that make use of the GPU/CPU quite hard but still not the worst case that can happen to a GPU/CPU.
I do hope that because of PS5 limitation, devs will be smarter than before. I played RE7 and when in the opening menu/option screen the GPU is working harder than when in the game (the fan was louder during the opening menu screen vs anywhere in the game). This kind of thing still happens from time to time where doing the simplest thing make the GPU work hard (maybe because it was rendering something simple, thus if you don't cap the fps, it simply run at full throttle without hitting any major bottleneck which ended up working the GPU hard?).

 

[HBRU]

I see trouble for Sony (that needs a chip shrink ASAP imho). All the TMSC production below 7nm is booked by Apple. The 6nm is booked by Intel... I'm not sure if this is the situation in the semiconductor industry... but if true no good for Sony.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/313222-intel-amd-reportedly-fighting-for-capacity-at-tsmc

 

[arandomguy]

My understanding is that neither Sony nor MS actually order directly from TSMC (at least for the console APUs) but from AMD themselves. So strictly speaking it isn't a question really of Sony needing to get more allocation from TSMC but more allocation from AMD's own share. Of course we don't know the strict details of the supply contract Sony has with respect to AMD but in theory if they do need higher capacity it'll ultimately come to whether or not AMD wants to (or has to) allocate more towards Sony from others areas that have more flexibility, the most notable candidate being the DIY segments.

 

[Picao84]

I wonder if we are going to see Mark Cerny leaving Sony or stepping down from his current position after PS5 launches. I got the feeling he was not in full control and had to fight the bean counters at Sony ever since The Road to PS5 show. There was a lot of focus on cost control in that presentation IMO (e.g. 825 GB SSD). Did he push too much for a lot of innovations (e.g. very high speed SSD, controller) that had to negotiate around a smaller SoC with very high clocks to balance the cost? If yes, that was not a very smart move IMO. Heavily underestimated Microsoft there.

 

[Adrian Orbis]

Will there be problems with PS4 BC? If it's any less than around 36 CUs, I mean.

 

[fehu]

He's no Kutaragi.

 

[gongo]

I wonder if we are going to see Mark Cerny leaving Sony or stepping down from his current position after PS5 launches. I got the feeling he was not in full control and had to fight the bean counters at Sony ever since The Road to PS5 show. There was a lot of focus on cost control in that presentation IMO (e.g. 825 GB SSD). Did he push too much for a lot of innovations (e.g. very high speed SSD, controller) that had to negotiate around a smaller SoC with very high clocks to balance the cost? If yes, that was not a very smart move IMO. Heavily underestimated Microsoft there.

The lead up to PS4 was relatively smooth sailing.
If the speculation about clocks and custom SSD controller affecting yields turn out to be true, Mark Cerny may have bit off more than he can chew?
Do you remember PS3 and Cell under Kutagari Ken?

 

[Picao84]

Will there be problems with PS4 BC? If it's any less than around 36 CUs, I mean.

Where does less than 36 CUs come from? If they can't have that, PS5 is finished!

 

[Picao84]

The lead up to PS4 was relatively smooth sailing.
If the speculation about clocks and custom SSD controller affecting yields turn out to be true, Mark Cerny may have bit off more than he can chew?
Do you remember PS3 and Cell under Kutagari Ken?

Is the SSD controller on the SoC? I thought it was a separate chip on the motherboard?

 

[gongo]

Is the SSD controller on the SoC? I thought it was a separate chip on the motherboard?

This is interesting, the IO die is much big than GPU + CPU.

 

[HBRU]

They probably had better results (and easy life) with 18 x 3 = 54 CU with a fixed max frequency at 2 x 911 ghz.... Really don't understand why they went so narrow and fast...

 

[Picao84]

This is interesting, the IO die is much big than GPU + CPU.

Probably because it has on chip RAM.

 

[gongo]

They probably had better results (and easy life) with 18 x 3 = 54 CU with a fixed max frequency at 2 x 911 ghz.... Really don't understand why they went so narrow and fast...

There were speculations Sony overclocked the GPU to look better with the double digits Tflops and with it they introduced variable clocks..
The original PS5 clocks were planned at 2Ghz.

 

[Picao84]

They probably had better results (and easy life) with 18 x 3 = 54 CU with a fixed max frequency at 2 x 911 ghz.... Really don't understand why they went so narrow and fast...

Cheaper die without considering clock speeds?