Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [2018]

[dobwal]

Console apu/cpu busines is usually low profit I think, even if they sell millions, but with minimal margins.

So intel with their over priced cpus with big margins maybe doesnt care much about console world.

A big chunk of AMD revenue comes from its semiconductor business. Margins on consoles can be smaller because you are mostly designing a limited number of chips and performing revisions that entails things like node shrinks. PC hardware is constantly redesigned with new arch or new features added to existing archs across a plethora of product lines.

http://ir.amd.com/news-releases/new...rth-quarter-and-annual-2017-financial-results

In Q417 computer and graphics produced $958 million in revenue and $58 million in profit. In Q416 $21 million in losses were recognized with $70 million in profits for Q316.

For semi custom, Q417 produced $522 million in revenue and just $19 million in profit. But Q416 profits were $47 million and in Q316 profits were at $84 million.

So over quarters Q417, Q416 and Q316 semi custom actually produced almost 50% more profits than computer and graphics.

For intel grabbing some of AMD‘s console business means grabbing the profits seen by AMD, GF and/or TSMC since Intel is the fab and chip seller. It also means that intel like AMD would be able to leverage some of the cost of R&D across third party products.

 

[ultragpu]

It’s not simply being Navi. From semiconductors articles I read on the web (I’ll post links when I get a chance), a midrange 16 nm chip needs about 200 engineer years to produce a working chip. For 7nm that number jumps to 500 years. You literally need 2.5X as many engineers at 7nm than you need at 16nm to meet a similar time frame for release.

So at 16 nm, AMD had to source resources for Vega, its PC derivatives and two mid gen console APUs mostly based on Polaris, an existing IP. For 7nm you have Navi with PC derivatives plus two next gen consoles with much higher potential for sales than mid gen consoles.

From a business perspective it makes a ton of sense to have a much larger design team for 7nm versus 16nm.

Has god no mercy?

Joke aside I do get what you mean but I feel like the vibe I'm getting here is AMD is really pouring more resources than how the ratio scales for their PS5 design. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but wouldn't surprise me if Sony pushed them hard on this.

 

[iroboto]

Has god no mercy?

Joke aside I do get what you mean but I feel like the vibe I'm getting here is AMD is really pouring more resources than how the ratio scales for their PS5 design. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but wouldn't surprise me if Sony pushed them hard on this.

Perhaps, just to temper some expectations, some reminders:
There's no money for AMD for semi-custom business, they know the console market is too price sensitive for AMD to be profiting here. That would limit Sony's ability to push them unless they were giving AMD more money, which of course is unlikely. Then consider where would Sony go realistically if not AMD?
Every other competitor is likely more expensive, and they'll shoot any chance they have at backward compatibility.

I don't think Sony can realistically push AMD, nor do they need to, if they believe MS is also going with AMD. They'll just end up releasing somewhat together anyway.

The only difference between then and now is that MS won't be rushed for launch like they were with XBO. OS, drivers, dx12 etc all that is already ready - at least as long as they stick with AMD.

If MS launches behind Sony, it's because it's the hardware holding them up.

 

[Xbat]

I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a big upfront cost for research and development that Sony has to pay if they want a lot of custom features and if that rumour is true about Sony and Navi.

 

[milk]

Sony, a maker of AAA contend and host for a number of other content from AAA to A to B- content wants hardware that best and most efficiently can provide a platform for such content.
AMD, a maker of hardware that targets that same kind of content, wants to create previsely that.
The way I see it, this is a win win R&D process. AMD gladily enjouys sony's imput, and sony gladly takes the fruits of it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I can see a situation where it's not a win/win though. To be competitive in the PC space, AMDs cards need to run optimally on DirectX. Sony don't care for DirectX. Thus there's potential that the direction Sony want to go for a GPU that'll fit their console will negatively impact what AMD will be able to release to the PC market afterwards. One hopes that the move is more a partnership with both weighing in on best GPU design for the future of AMD GPUs.

 

[Shortbread]

I can see a situation where it's not a win/win though. To be competitive in the PC space, AMDs cards need to run optimally on DirectX. Sony don't care for DirectX. Thus there's potential that the direction Sony want to go for a GPU that'll fit their console will negatively impact what AMD will be able to release to the PC market afterwards. One hopes that the move is more a partnership with both weighing in on best GPU design for the future of AMD GPUs.

I don't think Sony will be forcing or requiring AMD to do anything beyond the norms of DirectX, Vulcan, or any other APIs, other than AMD strengthening/migrating/updating parts of their previous toolchains to work alongside Sony's own internal APIs/SDKs for PS5. I mean, I just don't see Sony wanting the headaches associated with non-standard APIs, or the blowback of poor documentation and performance. Hopefully, those days (PS3/PS2) at Sony are long-gone.

 

[iroboto]

can someone explain to me how AMD would be developing Navi, which is built for PS5, but coming to PC. Does that mean MS is free riding off Sony's work if they also went with Navi?

the logic doesn't seem clear to me, and if someone can point out something I don't get, I can't see these rumours being that accurate. I don't doubt there are shreds of truth in here (it being Navi seems very plausible), but everything else seems off.

 

[AlNom]

What if Microsoft's next generation offering is a platform? I'll call it "XBox Infinite" because of the recent Halo announcement. Their next generation games are branded with this, as is the X1X, which, over time, can become their 1080p30 machine.

They can use whichever vendors they like, akin to Steam machines, and release devices across different prices and performance levels. Ideally, denoting performance:
- Tier 1-
1080p30 minimum. X1X performance or higher.
- Tier 2-
4KCB60 minimum (or some alternative form of reconstruction). Double X1X performance or higher. Still within the scope of an SoC.
- Tier 3-
4K60 minimum. High end gaming PC performance, necessitating an MCM design, a large case, lots of cooling, and a high price.

They could have the most powerful console at the highest price, an SoC based console to compete on price with the PS5, and a budget console with an already established market, mitigating some of the risk of launching a new generation.

It's an interesting scenario as the cross-gen era may be a fair bit longer than we're used to seeing, and in that sense, there is going to be a need for MS to overhaul the OneS and OneX for cost reduction, and shifting those to 7nm would imply further changes since those APUs may be too small to support their current bus sizes, at which point, they may as well switch to GDDR6 along with some other updates.

Marketing-wise they'd have to deprecate the One family while introducing this new family, even if they're at similar effective performance levels as previous gen (except for the Ludicrous Speed SKU).

 

[Shortbread]

can someone explain to me how AMD would be developing Navi, which is built for PS5, but coming to PC. Does that mean MS is free riding off Sony's work if they also went with Navi?

the logic doesn't seem clear to me, and if someone can point out something I don't get, I can't see these rumours being that accurate. I don't doubt there are shreds of truth in here (it being Navi seems very plausible), but everything else seems off.

Depends on the contracts and provisions in place. I'm pretty sure Sony didn't flip the whole cost of R&D dealing with the Navi architecture... if the rumors are true. And if, and I do mean IF, AMD and Sony truly collaborated together on Navi, I can see parts of the Navi collaboration going towards the PC side, not so much Microsoft next system. More than likely, Microsoft could be using something similar (next-generation) in AMD's roadmap, or something custom as well.

 

[anexanhume]

This post kinda confirms Sony has been targeting Sandy Bridge as a dummy architecture for their machine code analyzer work.

https://reviews.llvm.org/rL334853

 

[vipa899]

This post kinda confirms Sony has been targeting Sandy Bridge as a dummy architecture for their machine code analyzer work.

Thats for PS5?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This post kinda confirms Sony has been targeting Sandy Bridge as a dummy architecture for their machine code analyzer work.

https://reviews.llvm.org/rL334853

Does it?

We currently use SandyBridge as our generic CPU model, but it's better if we actually duplicate these tests for if/when we change the model, it also means we don't end up polluting the SandyBridge folder with tests for ISAs it doesn't support.

My best guess is they're running it on SandyBridge enabled PCs but the tools will adapt to specific ISAs. SandyBridge certainly has squat to do with PS5 - it's not coming with a SandyBridge CPU for a whole host of reasons!

 

[BRiT]

Sony = SandyBridge + Navi
MS = Zen2 + i740.5

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Sony = SandyBridge + Navi
MS = Zen2 + i740.5

Nintendo = 6510 + 128mb DDR6?

 

[mpg1]

What are the chances of this PS5 Navi hitting 15 tf now that we know AMD is pouring their life blood into it and maybe trying for something more than just a mid level gpu?

Navi is GCN architecture no? It has a limit of 64CU's iirc. That means you'd need about 1.8-1.9GHz gpu clock speed to reach 15 Tflops...I don't see that happening on a console....

Microsoft got Xbox One X to 1.172GHz on 16nm with a beefier cooling system. I feel like Sony could probably get to 1.3-1.4GHz on 7nm if they use a similar cooling system. That would be about 11TFlops.

 

[anexanhume]

Navi is GCN architecture no? It has a limit of 64CU's iirc. That means you'd need about 1.8-1.9GHz gpu clock speed to reach 15 Tflops...I don't see that happening on a console....

Microsoft got Xbox One X to 1.172GHz on 16nm with a beefier cooling system. I feel like Sony could probably get to 1.3-1.4GHz on 7nm if they use a similar cooling system. That would be about 11TFlops.

One of the more recent rumors alleges Navi is actually post GCN.

 

[iroboto]

Navi is GCN architecture no? It has a limit of 64CU's iirc. That means you'd need about 1.8-1.9GHz gpu clock speed to reach 15 Tflops...I don't see that happening on a console....

Microsoft got Xbox One X to 1.172GHz on 16nm with a beefier cooling system. I feel like Sony could probably get to 1.3-1.4GHz on 7nm if they use a similar cooling system. That would be about 11TFlops.

If I have been following the accurate threads Navi removes the CU restriction on GCN.

This would make Navi ideal for lower clock speeds because you can go wide again. But the rest of the pipeline is going to have to be massive as well to support it.

And if I have been following accurately The architecture after Navi is supposed to be post GCN. It had a name, but they didn’t like the name after reveal so they went back to calling it next gen.

 

[bitsandbytes]

Was that KUMA for post GCN? Mentioned in those recent Sony = Navi articles, iroboto.

 

[Shortbread]

If I have been following the accurate threads Navi removes the CU restriction on GCN.

This would make Navi ideal for lower clock speeds because you can go wide again. But the rest of the pipeline is going to have to be massive as well to support it.

And if I have been following accurately The architecture after Navi is supposed to be post GCN. It had a name, but they didn’t like the name after reveal so they went back to calling it next gen.

I remember there was some talk of Navi using AMD's Infinity Fabric process. If so, Sony could go for a scalability design as seen in AMD's Ryzen/Threadripper CPUs. Depending on the chips efficiency, TDP, and disabled cores (yield purposes), the scalability route on a die/SOC could offset any negative effects (lower clocks / disabled cores) on reaching a certain Tflop performance metric. Just a possibility...