Current Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

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Which is why I said "limit" and not "throttle." Why is that hard to comprehend? The more important point is that they are both engaging in power limiting but are opportunistic about it to allow more performance with the understanding not all usage modes are equal.

Series X doesn't limit clocks..... It's a fixed clock. Meaning there's no variance. Having a limit means that clocks fluctuate and reach that limit and then throttle... Quite different.
 
Now xsx has 6GB/s decompressor, and it is 1.25x of the SSD speed 4.8 GB/s .

In other words xsx SSD can have 80% of the decompressor speed while PS5 SSD can only reach 9GB/s which is only 40% of the 22GB/s decompressor speed.

Is there any limitation about SONY’ SSD technique? Or they expect there will be better compression algorithm to fully use 22GB/s decompressor?
 
Which is why I said "limit" and not "throttle." Why is that hard to comprehend? The more important point is that they are both engaging in power limiting but are opportunistic about it to allow more performance with the understanding not all usage modes are equal.
Going by your logic every single cpu and gpu is limited/throttled unless running under liquid nitrogen.
Comparing ps5 frequency changing and xsx fixed frequency and saying its limited just doesn't make sense in the context of this discussion.

They've said so many statements and videos about BC already. Seems odd to remove a single tweet.
Yea, probably more accurate in terms of their process, but also probably unnecessary.
 
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They should just say 99% or something.
99% pff
They should say 150%, the power of series X, powerful enough to translate from ppc to x86 realtime, no more repack and relicensing.

Xbox arcade is now reopen!!
(where my personal BC dreams lay)
 
Now xsx has 6GB/s decompressor, and it is 1.25x of the SSD speed 4.8 GB/s .

In other words xsx SSD can have 80% of the decompressor speed while PS5 SSD can only reach 9GB/s which is only 40% of the 22GB/s decompressor speed.

Is there any limitation about SONY’ SSD technique? Or they expect there will be better compression algorithm to fully use 22GB/s decompressor?

Was some dev (or engineer?) tweeting that the xsx using its BCpack can mitigate the difference with the ps5 ssd. Windows central backed that up, but didn't name bcpack. It's something unannounced from MS (and other things).
 
Now xsx has 6GB/s decompressor, and it is 1.25x of the SSD speed 4.8 GB/s .

In other words xsx SSD can have 80% of the decompressor speed while PS5 SSD can only reach 9GB/s which is only 40% of the 22GB/s decompressor speed.

Is there any limitation about SONY’ SSD technique? Or they expect there will be better compression algorithm to fully use 22GB/s decompressor?
There is no limitation. Just as always Microsoft like to talk about theoretical max numbers as it those were typical, average numbers. PS5 SSD also reaches >20GB/s in ideal conditions. 6GB/s (or 4.8GB/s ?) would be also ideal conditions for MS. Some data cannot be compressed as much when you use a lossless algo.
 
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I went back and tried to find my predictions from the earliest post I had for this gen. This is what I had:

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/...eration-edition-2014-2017.56353/#post-1814831

Nintendo (With WiiU sales down 25% YoY as of week 50,2014 in Japan, I think they will launch sooner)
Launch: 2016 (WiiU has a 4 year lifespan)
Power Consumption: 50W
Process: 28nm
CPU/GPU: 1.6 GHz AMD Quad-core x86 + 800 Gigaflop GPU
RAM: Unified 4GB DDR4 2166
Optical: BRD
Storage: 128GB Flash
Controller: Traditional, but new portable can be used as gamepad for backwards compatibility
Price: $249

Sony - I think they'll go for the more of the same (I would)
Launch: 2019
Power Consumption: 150W
Process: 10nm
CPU: 2.4GHz AMD x86 true octa-core (no more 2 quad-core modules)
GPU: AMD 8 Teraflop 1 GHz
Memory: Unified 16 GB HBM @ 1TB/sec
Optical: BRD
Storage: 512MB SSD
Price: 399
Controller: Same

Microsoft - I think they'll go for a lower spec'ed system, but sooner and at a lower price.
Launch: 2018
Power Consumption: 100W
Process: 10nm
CPU: Nvidia 2.0GHz ARM octa-core
GPU: Nvidia 6-8 Teraflop 1 GHz
Memory: Unified 16 GB HBM @ 1TB/sec
Storage: 512MB SSD
Optical: None
Price: 349
Controller: Same

Missed completely on Nintendo.

I think I came close enough for Sony, missed MS completely, but successfully got SSD for both.
 
Xbox arcade is now reopen!!
(where my personal BC dreams lay)
Would be nice if they do a fallback for any non repackaged game. That it can run it off disc natively.
Same fallback for Digital only games so work natively also without repackaging.
Was some dev (or engineer?) tweeting that the xsx using its BCpack can mitigate the difference with the ps5 ssd. Windows central backed that up, but didn't name bcpack. It's something unannounced from MS (and other things).
As far as I can tell they are just reporting the same source, so no windows central hasn't really backed it up.
 
There probably aren’t too many unique “Big Navi” SKUs to generate this comparison. We can also assume 5700XT is the reference as it would generate the most favorable numbers. The biggest concern is we don’t know what the comparisons are iso of. I’m sure big Navi does quite well at the same frequency because the voltage is lowered. We also have no idea how broad the comparison is since it’s “internal estimates.” One game that leverages VRS could have a huge delta.
It's less likely that AMD is playing as fast and loose with its numbers at it did with the later 28nm GPUs, in part because its most recent strategies have cut back on how many GPUs are available in a given time interval to cherry-pick. The Nano example does show how much specific SKU choices can produce leading PR blurbs.


The anti-tamper measures in this generation are fairly extensive:
The video's discussion about what they had to do in order to handle the change from always online shows how much engineering work was done behind the scenes that wasn't visible to outside observers. A lot of good work went into sidegrades or unsuccessful directions with the first console, but we have seen what happens when there's a more cohesive plan with the consoles since.
There's an interchange about AMD's security apparatus starting at 54:50 that is interesting in terms of how he insisted that his team wrote the relevant firmware, and that it was clear that they went with AMD because they had a good GPU. Then he apparently ran out of nice things to say about AMD's default security offerings.

No, i am talking about what happens after decompression. PS5 can move 22 GB/s after because has a lot of custom blocks. And XSX without them ?.
That could be related to a difference in how wide and fast the connection is between the decompression block and the data fabric, or an implementation choice in the decompression hardware.
A simpler and more standard algorithm could have a smaller decompressor, and it might be more straightforward to let it ramp to some silly high number in rare instances without incurring heavy hardware costs. A more complicated compression standard may have prioritized more general scenarios at the expense of rare cases with high peak ratios, and it might have led to hardware that would have been more expensive to scale for scenarios that are very rare. For the sake of argument with made up numbers, a block can decompress at ~5 GB/s at least 75% of the time but cannot run at 20 GB/s for 0.1% of the time is more generally useful than one that runs at 4.5 GB/s or lower almost all the time but can hit 20 GB/s in very rare instances.
 
Series X limits CPU clock in SMT mode. It's a different means to the same end.
No.
Two different modes of operation and neither throttle. The two modes run at different frequencies, saying throttle is misleading even if I understand what you're saying.

If there was one mode would you say its throttled?
I remember Microsoft saying that the SMT off was there because enabled can mess with the emulation/backwards compatibility.
 
I remember Microsoft saying that the SMT off was there because enabled can mess with the emulation/backwards compatibility.

Not quite. From what I recall... They indicated because all older games are setup with only 7 Threads that they would have a larger benefit from 7 Threads running even higher static speed at 3.8 GHz instead of static 3.6 GHz. They didn't say having more threads (14) would mess with emulation / backwards compatibility.

EDIT: Exact words from MS in https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-inside-xbox-series-x-full-specs

"From a game developer's perspective, we expect a lot of them to actually stick with the eight cores because their current games are running with the distribution often set to seven cores and seven worker threads," explains Microsoft technical fellow and Xbox system architect Andrew Goossen. "And so for them to go wider, for them to go to 14 hardware threads, it means that they have the system to do it, but then, you have to have workloads that split even more effectively across them. And so we're actually finding that the vast majority of developers - talking with them about the their choices for launch - the vast majority are going to go with the SMT disabled and the higher clock."
 
A doubt i have: Sony's magic is in its custom IO processor that can effectively move upto 22 GB/s uncompressed data from the SSD to main RAM and even accelerates moves from RAM to GPU cache.
If MS only has the decompressor what happen afterwards?. At which speed moves the data to main RAM?. wouldnt effective data move from SSD to RAM in a speed way smaller than the one given from the decompressor?.

It ain’t magic. It’s Kraken. It’s most marketed advantage is its decode speed which is multiple times faster than zlib. It’s also been lauded because it offers better compression (~20% better) than zlib.

But the XSX’s disadvantage doesn’t come from not being able to decode as fast as chip in the PS5 or offer less compressed data. MS is claiming 1:2 compression (2.4->4.8) for typical workloads while Sony isn’t claiming 5.5->11.

Again it’s Kraken and is not a compression scheme thats marketed as being regularly capable of losslessly compressing data at a 1:4 ratio. Kraken could claim way better compression than zlib if it was doing that level of compression for any significant portion of the data.

The PS5 biggest advantage is its raw bandwidth and the biggest benefit of kraken is probably that Sony didn’t have source a more costly solution than MS since Sony compressor is handling more twice the amount of compressed data.
 
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I remember Microsoft saying that the SMT off was there because enabled can mess with the emulation/backwards compatibility.
Cross gen engines will be coded for 7 cores and 7 threads, so running at a higher frequency without smt will see a bigger benefit.
So not actually about BC titles, more about the engines themselves that are for in development games.
BC games probably works fine with smt on.
 
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