News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

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3dilettante said:
Not everything. There's a plethora of microcontrollers in computing systems these days, and even some on the same die as the CPU and GPU, but they are so far removed from being exposed to software that even marketing doesn't bother.
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Well it was just in fun, but in this case the chip actually does something, so lets count it in so we can get to 2 instead of 1.9
 
I think you guys are splitting hairs over some semantics... Lol. Does it really matter if it's more accurate of a statement than the phrase suggests?

That's like... reverse bs'ing... :)
 
rockaman said:
I think you guys are splitting hairs over some semantics... Lol. Does it really matter if it's more accurate of a statement than the phrase suggests?
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Yes, when it's being used as a reference point for other information. If that PR statement is categorically an assertion that the total system performance is under 2 TFs, we know to ignore any rumours that the Jag core is double FP at 200 GFlops. If the PR statement is only talking about GPU, the CPU may or may not be 200 GFlops enhanced or vanilla 100 GFlops. As the PR statement is the only official metric we have for reference, being clear about it is important to understanding implications for the rest of the system.
 
The thing is, that PR seems to be mirroring Mark Cerny's language from the presentation, and he was talking specifically about the GPU when he said "nearly (almost?) 2 Teraflops". Not that I think some random yahoo a ARS is right, but the statement in the press materials is no conclusive.
 
Silenti said:
-The memory structure is unified, but weird; it's not like the GPU can just grab arbitrary memory like some people were thinking (rather, it can, but it's slow). They're incorporating another type of shader that can basically read from a ring buffer (supplied in a streaming fashion by the CPU) and write to an output buffer. I don't have all the details, but it seems interesting.
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This seems interesting, some type of intermediate ESRAM to reduce latency?.
 
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Shifty Geezer said:
Yes, when it's being used as a reference point for other information. If that PR statement is categorically an assertion that the total system performance is under 2 TFs, we know to ignore any rumours that the Jag core is double FP at 200 GFlops. If the PR statement is only talking about GPU, the CPU may or may not be 200 GFlops enhanced or vanilla 100 GFlops. As the PR statement is the only official metric we have for reference, being clear about it is important to understanding implications for the rest of the system.
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That's all I'm saying though.

Its just PR speak. We can't use it as anything definitive.

Splitting hairs over a PR statement isn't worth it IMO, even if the PR statement is direct from AMD.

Using an imprecise PR statement won't help I don't think, that is all :)
 
Love_In_Rio said:
I wouldn´t read very much about this as if someone has a strong NDA is AMD. Carmack even said "I can’t speak freely about PS4, but now that some specs have been made public", that could imply there is more than we know.
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If there is one specific thing I would still wish for is that the hdd in ps4 would have flash part in it to optimize access to often used content. And to make that better let the game configure how cache is to be used. That might prove quite beneficial to streaming content in.

I suppose also the exact modifications done to communication/co-operation between cpu/gpu are under nda and might be quite interesting.
 
I hope the CPU isn't going to be a bottleneck... If I were Sony I would have doubled the flops just to be safe.
 
MBDF said:
I hope the CPU isn't going to be a bottleneck... If I were Sony I would have doubled the flops just to be safe.
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A bottleneck in what case?,there are cases where doubling your peak FLOPs isn't really going to do much if anything for your draw calls.
 
MBDF said:
I hope the CPU isn't going to be a bottleneck... If I were Sony I would have doubled the flops just to be safe.
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What is the formula for determining whether the CPU will become a bottleneck, given that:
(1) There are dedicated audio, video and compression h/w in play
(2) CPU and GPU share data over the same, unified memory. No need to go through DirectX API. No overriding need to copy data between units.
(3) GPU can also do some compute jobs (e.g., path finding, occlusion, etc.)
(4) Large pool of memory to keep intermediate as well as prepared data (The PS3 had to do a lot of extra work to housekeep data in-memory).
 
Based on what we know so far, is there anything to indicate that PS4 will be a repeat of PS3 in the sense of being a theoretically powerful system but ports may suffer due to being difficult to program for?
I would rather not suffer repeat of examples like Skyrim PS3.
 
ninzel said:
Based on what we know so far, is there anything to indicate that PS4 will be a repeat of PS3 in the sense of being a theoretically powerful system but ports may suffer due to being difficult to program for?
I would rather not suffer repeat of examples like Skyrim PS3.
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Ports from what?
 
ninzel said:
Based on what we know so far, is there anything to indicate that PS4 will be a repeat of PS3 in the sense of being a theoretically powerful system but ports may suffer due to being difficult to program for?
I would rather not suffer repeat of examples like Skyrim PS3.
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From the incomplete information we have and the general tenor of Sony's statements, they've gone further than many expected to make the system familiar to programmers and have taken a sizeable financial hit to make the system's performance consistent.

It's not certain at this point, but while the peak performance of the PS4 might not match a top PC, it has fewer significant bottlenecks. This may--and I stress may--be the platform that is considered the most consistent with less hand-holding and fewer surprise pitfalls.
 
patsu said:
What is the formula for determining whether the CPU will become a bottleneck, given that:
(1) There are dedicated audio, video and compression h/w in play...
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Yep. What do people think the CPU will be doing such that half of Cell's capabilities won't be enough considering the CPU won't have to do a quarter of the work (based on a broad understanding of the workloads)?

ninzel said:
Based on what we know so far, is there anything to indicate that PS4 will be a repeat of PS3 in the sense of being a theoretically powerful system but ports may suffer due to being difficult to program for?
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Broadly speaking, PS4 is a laptop PC with unified memory. There shouldn't be an issues at all. There's nothing complex about managing the system regards memory moving or peculiar ISAs or anything of the sort. Should be a very easy console to work with, with the tools being the limiting factor.
 
Speaking from just opinion Shifty, you think Sony has their ducks in order to actually provide capable tools this time around?
 
Didn't someone say the vita tools are great now? It's likely the ps4 ones are of equal standing surely, they aren't going to regress after making good progress.
 
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