Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?
- Thread starter invictis
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davis.anthony
Veteran
Yes of course, as to how often they do is another question to which we don't know the answer to.
But on light games loads is likely more than feasible.
Yes to your first question.
The second question the answers aren’t known.
I think I tried to take a stab at this one time reverse engineering Cerny’s comments. I think I worked it out that if the GPU had to give power to the CPU, according to his comments, the resulting TF after slowing down would be around 9TF of performance.
Which I found coincidental to the original reports of ps5 being a 9TF machine.
But really we have no clue. We know that it has to be conservative enough so that the silicon is still cheap, and if you are conservative your silicon yield can’t be targeting the extreme high end, so their “all consoles must perform the same” code, should be designed to work on the lowest end of the yield they are willing to accept.
arandomguy
Veteran
Utilization and therefore power load on a CPU or GPU can vary at the same frequency depending on the work load. It's likely that the system is configured in way that factors in power as it pertains actual power usage or thermal dissipation.
Imagine a workload that uses 50% of the CPU and GPU ALUs - you can run it faster under a given power load. Now take a workload that's saturating the CPU and GPU - you need more watts than your upper limit if ran at full speed, so you slow them down. And balanced between them as needed.
The only point was to eek out an extra few percentage points of clock performance for the GPU, essentially. I think Sony really wanted to be able to hit the 10TF benchmark for marketing reasons, as I'm sure they knew full well what Microsoft were doing and aiming for and how it would look if they were only at 9TF and change.
Using this feature, they can help route a little bit of extra power to the GPU when the CPU isn't being heavily utilized. But since developers cant rely on that extra GPU frequency always being there, I imagine it's not really making any large effect on how games are actually performing.
It comes down to power limits, and in the function of power requirements, Frequency is a cubic variable when it comes to power consumption. Small reductions in frequency reduces a massive amount of power.
Because all chips will be limited by heat and power you can only make a chip go so fast, which is why we moved away from single core high frequency to multicore and low frequency. Wider can produce similar computation results at a much lower power requirement as you can reduce the frequency.
because not all code is equal in terms of activity on the chip, you may as well allow the system to variably alter the frequency to maximize the performance of the chip and adjust the frequency by the load.
Johnny Awesome
Veteran
I don't think they should bother with a new Xbox unless they can get 4x performance for $599. Whenever they can do that is when they should offer it. Then lower XSX digital (no drive) to $399 and XSS to $199.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
It's debatable if 4X raster would be possible for a new gen in 2028, let alone a midgen update. I think a 2X increase - and that's being very optimistic for late 2024 - would be attractive at $599 for decent chunk of buyers. The PS4 Pro and OneX were always a minority of sales, I don't think either Sony or MS has expectations that a midgen refresh is going to fly off the shelves, but 20+m potential sales would still make it worthwhile.
Given that neither company was willing to release sales data for the enhanced models, I’d be surprised if either sold more than a couple million.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
I doubt that.
PS4 Pro Represents Nearly One in Every Five PS4s Sold
ign said:
The PS4 Pro was released late 2016. From 2017-2022, total PS4 sales was ~57 million.
So if that 20% is accurate, we're talking ~10m range considering when it was released. There is no way it was just over a couple million, that would be regarded as a failure and I doubt we would be hearing about a PS5 Pro if that was actually the case, such a meagre sell-through would hardly attract dev interest and barely recoup R&D investment.
Also note that interview was in June 2017, the % could have increased in later years once more people got 4K TV's and games became more demanding. So I think 10m is likely conservative.
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Wasn't aware of that data point, thx. Were there any future statements? We don't know for sure if that continued going forward passed the initial excitement of a console refresh.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Not that I'm aware of, the 20% number was the only one I heard of.
Seeing how X is selling in comparison to S, and the overall decline is Xbox Series sales as of recent, I'm not surprise this is the case.
And Pro was always quite hard to find about everywhere and they quickly stopped producing it. They could have sold way more if stocks were better. I think they won't do the same mistake with PS5 Pro.
Flappy Pannus
Veteran
Where did you hear that? At the start of the pandemic like everything yeah, but I never had any difficulty getting mine and it was stocked in shelves everywhere I saw up until 2020 at least. I'm sure Sony cut production significantly when the PS5 was nearing release and they likely didn't expect the supply chain issues to last as long as they did, but the Pro was released Nov 2016, there was a good 3+ years of production.
On the subject of Pro consoles as a whole, it's indicative of the price constraints everyone is under that the 1TB Series S, even with the price of NVRAM cratering, had an MSRP increase of $50. It's possible that MS is for whatever reason, more price sensitive than Sony - frankly this 1TB model makes the value proposition of it even even worse than the 512GB variant compared to the Digital PS5 imo. For just $50 more you're getting a so, so much more capable machine, but I guess gamepass is a big factor in the overall value. But man, that's quite a gap in capability for just saving less than the price of one game.
Late 2024 is still quite a ways off sure, but this does make me wonder what exactly they'll charge for the Pro if they can actually deliver a meaningful improvement.
Which rules it out, as if they aren't working on it already, they won't be able to get a mid-gen refresh in the middle of this gen.
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