Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

[cheapchips]

When I used Netflix in France last week on a UK account the selection was different. I don't know if this helps anyone's actual point or not. The most important part is that your kids can still watch Octonauts when iPlayer isn't available.

 

[Michellstar]

Zen is a great but 8 physical cores is a big amount of silicon and they've yet to launch, putting an APU altogether for fall 2017 sounds like a impossible target.

What´s imposible about it??
We don´t know the die size of "summit ridge"
And zen apus are coming 2017, for sure, moreover AMD engineers has been dropping hints of future apu designs, with HBM and DDR4.

If a Zen core is around a double up jaguar core (L3 apart) it could end up taking the same space at 14nm than the eight jaguar cores at 28nm.

Anyway, at the end of the year with Neo and Zen, will have more data-points to guess

 

[Globalisateur]

I think it will have Zen cores too. It would be a waste to release a console in 2017 using feline family when Zen is available. That's the only logical explanation of why they would wait end of 2017 to release their next hardware (even if they took this decision this year):

Because Zen + Vega would be available. Also the 6 tfops would be more efficient than now (with Vega) and I wouldn't be surprised to see a higher number than 6 tflops too. Unlike Sony Microsoft do overclock their consoles before launch if they reasonably can.

 

[mpg1]

I mean I know this is unlikely...but it would be cool If Scoprio games did allow to choose between a 1080p fixed or a max resolution (ie 4K dynamic res or whatever) setting. With the 1080p option bumping up details/AA.

 

[Clukos]

I mean I know this is unlikely...but it would be cool If Scoprio games did allow to choose between a 1080p fixed or a max resolution (ie 4K dynamic res or whatever) setting. With the 1080p option bumping up details/AA.

At this point they might as well enable full PC settings, the UWP apps already have an extensive array of setting available (see Forza apex mostly ), i think that'd be very easy to "enable" on Scorpio games!

 

[mpg1]

At this point they might as well enable full PC settings, the UWP apps already have an extensive array of setting available (see Forza apex mostly ), i think that'd be very easy to "enable" on Scorpio games!

Nah, full settings on a single spec machine is kinda pointless as developers should just max it out regardless. But a resolution setting option of 1080p fixed vs max resolution (with higher graphic fidelity resulting on 1080p fixed) would make sense to me as there still a lot of people not with 4K TVs.

 

[liolio]

What´s imposible about it??
We don´t know the die size of "summit ridge"

I used "would" not "is", The time line is the pretty short and AMD does not have Intel workforce.
We don't know size of Summit Ridge, but we know the size of Intel big core, we know AVX2 units have to take their air amount of space, we know they use more L2 than Intel, 8 cores require a fair amount of L3. We can make educated guess. I would suspect it would end up taking more space than Jaguar did in this gen of console. Not an impossible amount (and they could have less physical cores and yet 8 cores). Timeline is what concerns me more, not footprint.

EDIT
I in fact used "sound like"

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Nah, full settings on a single spec machine is kinda pointless as developers should just max it out regardless. But a resolution setting option of 1080p fixed vs max resolution (with higher graphic fidelity resulting on 1080p fixed) would make sense to me as there still a lot of people not with 4K TVs.

It's not pointless, just less relevant in most cases. But there are certainly cases where the chosen graphics settings don't result in a locked 30 or 60 FPS. Being able to adjust settings is useful then. Or in the case where a developer chooses to target 30 FPS but the player finds 30 FPS unacceptable, graphics settings are extremely useful.

I don't expect many graphics options to be exposed to players on console, however. But it would be nice if they at least included resolution options and a 30/60 FPS option. Additionally it would be nice if they offered the option to disable motion blur, DoF, chromatic aberration, etc. for those that do not like the effects and find them extremely unrealistic (especially in the case of DoF for me).

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

I mean I know this is unlikely...but it would be cool If Scoprio games did allow to choose between a 1080p fixed or a max resolution (ie 4K dynamic res or whatever) setting. With the 1080p option bumping up details/AA.

I suppose this is entirely up to the developer to handle. I think it's why it's such a grey area. I don't think Spencer wants to commit to all titles being 1080p/60 enhanced. Vs 4K.

It's clear that the discussion with developers is only happening now, as he kept Scorpio from being leaked. Also lends to why he announced it at E3 so far in advance.

The dialogue is still being built.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Jwm]

I would gladly take 1080p/60 (TV) or 90+ for VR that is rock solid vs 4K/30 that is going to be watered down. I remember well the days on PC when you started to play with resolution to gain back other effects that added more (back in my CRT days). On the other hand, for other types of games I would max resolution to eye bleeding and drop some effects to get a better draw distance without jaggies (racing sims at the time so you could better see the track). Then I purchased a Sega racing game on OG Xbox, and found it horrid because I could not see the track (well PS1 games were on my list as were PS2, Xbox 360, etc).

So I would not mind to see Forza 6 (erm 7) maybe going 4k/60 and keeping the track lines really clean, as I like to look ahead to pick where I am going to place the car. Then for Halo 6 I would be happy with 1080/60 with effects to really draw me into the spectacle of an alien battle.

I really hope they improve the audio on Scorpio, as Xbox One was not the leap I was hoping for.

 

[Proelite]

Cp and paste from gaf:

Since Scorpio is long time out, and the specs aren't finalized, here is some Scorpio wank that falls within historical precedents, (i.e. PS4's memory jump, Xb1's upclocks)

Consider the render bait and switch in the wank, so that's thrown out.

CPU is 4 core Zen "lite", 8 logical cores. More than 100% processing capability over the 8 jaguars cores.
GPU is 48 CU Navi part at 1ghz, 6.1 teraflops. 1 stack of 4GB of HBM2 ram, 256 gb/s bandwidth.
Main memory, 16GB of DDR4, ~100 GB/S bandwidth.

Conservative thermals allows the clocks to be upped by some amount like the XB1. Maybe to the base clock of 1080. 6.6 teraflops.

Combined with the CPU, PR can say "nearly 7 teraflops".

For those who says DDR4 bus and HBM2 bus is too pricey, DDR4 bus is smaller and cheaper than GDDR5 bus.

Not to mention that future AMD APUs will have HBM2, will have a DDR4 bus and also will have Zen CPU.

So it's not a stretch to have Scorpio be the baseline architecture for future AMD APUs.

Hardware BC enabled because of HBM2 acting like Esram.

 

[eastmen]

Why would zen be to big and expensive ? Look at intels line of cpus. The cpu cores are tiny. Zen should be the same.

I doubt we will get less than 8 physical cores and 16 threads.

I also think the 6tflop is just marketing speak , the truth will be that its some where above 6tflops but clocks are not finalized nor are disabled cu's so they wont nail it down yet

Also DDR 4 at a 100gigs bandwidth isn't enough. If they do HBM 2 they wont go with less than 8 gigs. I think its just cheaper for them go with gdrx and call it a day

 

[AlNom]

Why would zen be to big and expensive ? Look at intels line of cpus. The cpu cores are tiny. Zen should be the same.

Are you comparing to Intel's 22nm? Intel's 14nm is denser than Sammy "14nmFF" or TSMC "16nmFF" gen.

edit:

I think the Ivy bridge cores (not counting the L3 cache) are about 12.5mm^2, so 8 of those are ~100mm^2.

IIRC, AMD historically hasn't done so well with SRAM density vs Intel as well.

Anyways, it's really not that fair to compare the two companies' R&D.

 

[dobwal]

They may do,Sky Uk who has the UK rights for Premier League football which is also sold to other broadcasters as exclusive rights for their territory.

Sky was trying to enforce this and did not like people buying say Greek TV packages with Premier League football in the UK. It went through the courts and SKY lost.

I don't see how Netflix and film companies are any different apart from their being no court case yet.

Netflix is possibly a bad example for a stream provider as I believe you can authenticate with any Netflix region with any Netflix credentials so.you could be a UK subscriber trying to connect to Netflix France. To be analogous with SKY you would be a UK resident who pays Netflix France and trying to watch Netflix France.

Sky is ultimately just a content provider while content owners have much more leverage. Sky may have lost because the contract language involved didn't require other providers to establish region blocks. That doesn't mean it won't happen in the future. There is nothing illegal if content owners refuse to renew a license in the future because a content provider refuses to play ball now.

 

[eastmen]

Are you comparing to Intel's 22nm? Intel's 14nm is denser than Sammy "14nmFF" or TSMC "16nmFF" gen.

Even if you look at ivybridge which is 22nm

Ivy bridge M-2 is 94mm2 634m tranistors and that's 2 cores and 6 gpu eus with 3 MB of l3 cahce.



Here the gpu takes up a third of the die size and appears to be an 8 eu and 4 core cpu.


At 14nm the Zen cores may not be much bigger than Jaguar cores at 28nm

 

[AlNom]

Even if you look at ivybridge which is 22nm

Ivy bridge M-2 is 94mm2 634m tranistors and that's 2 cores and 6 gpu eus with 3 MB of l3 cahce.

View attachment 1372

Here the gpu takes up a third of the die size and appears to be an 8 eu and 4 core cpu.


At 14nm the Zen cores may not be much bigger than Jaguar cores at 28nm

See above post.

 

[dobwal]

Unless the Slim is Zen based then I doubt Scorpio will be. The cheapest design is to simply take the apu of the slim and slap an external gpu into the box. U can grab an off the gpu shelf part and minimize design and production costs.

It's a mid gen part so I doubt MS wants to do a bunch of engineering to make every thing to play nice.

 

[eastmen]

See above post.

and jaguar was 3.1mm2 . So we will have to see what zen comes in at but if its around 12mm2 it wouldn't be a huge problem putting in 8 of them

 

[AlNom]

and jaguar was 3.1mm2 . So we will have to see what zen comes in at but if its around 12mm2 it wouldn't be a huge problem putting in 8 of them

Well, we're talking about 100mm^2 of intel engineered cores then even more die space for the L3, plus over 232mm^2 for just a lolaris 10 level part.

Add more fluff for the uncore material as well.

I don't know if it's a huge problem or not, but there's exactly zero to go on making the discussion fluffy.

 

[Cyan]

Cp and paste from gaf:

Since Scorpio is long time out, and the specs aren't finalized, here is some Scorpio wank that falls within historical precedents, (i.e. PS4's memory jump, Xb1's upclocks)

Consider the render bait and switch in the wank, so that's thrown out.

CPU is 4 core Zen "lite", 8 logical cores. More than 100% processing capability over the 8 jaguars cores.
GPU is 48 CU Navi part at 1ghz, 6.1 teraflops. 1 stack of 4GB of HBM2 ram, 256 gb/s bandwidth.
Main memory, 16GB of DDR4, ~100 GB/S bandwidth.

Conservative thermals allows the clocks to be upped by some amount like the XB1. Maybe to the base clock of 1080. 6.6 teraflops.

Combined with the CPU, PR can say "nearly 7 teraflops".

For those who says DDR4 bus and HBM2 bus is too pricey, DDR4 bus is smaller and cheaper than GDDR5 bus.

Not to mention that future AMD APUs will have HBM2, will have a DDR4 bus and also will have Zen CPU.

So it's not a stretch to have Scorpio be the baseline architecture for future AMD APUs.

Hardware BC enabled because of HBM2 acting like Esram.

wouldn't be that configuration a little compromised? I mean, for 4k games and 4k res textures, 4GB aren't enough