How much of a bottleneck is Jaguar in current gen consoles?

[ProspectorPete]

Guess Sony was not that stupid for not awaiting a better CPU

 

[Goodtwin]

As long as developers know what they have to work with, its not a big deal. Its not to say that a quad core I7 wouldn't open up the door to more possibilities, but within the cost and power consumption envelope, the 8 core Jaguar seems to get the job done. Developers also quickly became intimate with multi threading, something that hadn't really taken off until PS4/X1 released. Until then most games ran just fine on a dual core processor, and rarely were games making significant use of more than two cores. On PC you would see the "main" thread at 100%, second at 80%, and then 10-20% each additional thread available. I'm sure on PS4 they have nearly every core singing pretty good on your recent most demanding games.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Will they go with a 4c/8t Ryzen CPU or a 8c/16t?

We don't even know if AMD is getting the deal for either console... We could even be an ARM CPU in a nvidia SoC.

 

[HMBR]

We don't even know if AMD is getting the deal for either console... We could even be an ARM CPU in a nvidia SoC.

I have a hard time seeing MS going with an ARM CPU, since they are so interested in keeping games compatible going forward and having more PC+XB compatibility, to much trouble when they can most likely always get a good deal with AMD, and Ryzen is really competitive.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

I have a hard time seeing MS going with an ARM CPU, since they are so interested in keeping games compatible going forward and having more PC+XB compatibility, to much trouble when they can most likely always get a good deal with AMD, and Ryzen is really competitive.

OTOH there's an ARM version of Windows 10 capable of running legacy x86 software..

And AMD will be in the business of offering "good deals" as long as they're the underdog. They might not be in that position in a couple of years (not likely, but possible) and play harder to get.

 

[HMBR]

OTOH there's an ARM version of Windows 10 capable of running legacy x86 software..

And AMD will be in the business of offering "good deals" as long as they're the underdog. They might not be in that position in a couple of years (not likely, but possible) and play harder to get.

I think that version is not out yet, and is going to require very specific ARM SoCs (I think Snapdragon 835) and it's targeting 32bits programs only, also I think performance is not going to be very high.

I don't see AMD's position changing much,

 

[Jay]

I think that version is not out yet, and is going to require very specific ARM SoCs (I think Snapdragon 835) and it's targeting 32bits programs only, also I think performance is not going to be very high.

I don't see AMD's position changing much,

some pretty bold claims.
i believe it can run 64bit.
sure it comes out later this year with the 835, but how do you know what performance is like?
also what will the performance be like in 3-4 years?
it may not be beating top of the line i7 or zens, but does it need to.

 

[jiaolu]

We don't even know if AMD is getting the deal for either console... We could even be an ARM CPU in a nvidia SoC.

why should they use the arm cpu and for what gains they can have?

 

[Deleted member 13524]

why should they use the arm cpu and for what gains they can have?

If nvidia (or even Samsung or Qualcomm, for example) gets a design win they'll use an ARM CPU because they can't use anything else.

 

[HMBR]

some pretty bold claims.
i believe it can run 64bit.
sure it comes out later this year with the 835, but how do you know what performance is like?
also what will the performance be like in 3-4 years?
it may not be beating top of the line i7 or zens, but does it need to.

from all the info released only 32bit is going to be supported at least for a time (articles like this mentioned it briefly http://hothardware.com/news/windows-10-runs-on-a-snapdragon-processor-with-x86-apps-fully-functional)
as for performance they demoed and planned to support with snapdragon 820 sooner, but apparently scrapped that due to performance, so it's likely far from great, x86 on ARM emulation was never very fast as far as I know,
performance in 4 years could be improved, but at the same time ARM cores are likely to still target mainly very low wattage and don't scale up all that much,
Zen cores are pretty small (as far as big x86 cores go), they could make a lower power version (lower power in PC terms) quite well I think, and they don't have the AMR-x86 emulation overhead combined with likely significantly higher performance anyway...

I think MS wanting more PC and forwards compatibility pretty much rules out ARM CPU on the next 3-4 years for an Xbox, but, who knows.

 

[eastmen]

Someone posted a graph showing the 8 /16 core zen's scaling at different frequencies and I believe at 2.6ghz it goes down to 35w. So if we are looking at a 7nm console for next gen Both Sony and MS would be silly to loose compatibility to switch to arm from x86. On 7nm you should be able to cut power usage in half and at that point they may be able to add additional IPC improvements in an updated Zen core. The cores will also be tiny as hell on 7nm.