Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [post E3 2019, pre GDC 2020] [XBSX, PS5]

It's a circuit board.




You're going to have to be more specific with a still-shot and location circled.

 

Dissapointing that they use an outdated Memoryconcept instead of HBM2/3 or other Wide I/O solutions. Thanks to their "Play Anywhere" Ecosystem, it results in a generic Hardwarearchitecture. That's when merchants say that in a company, rather than the technicians and engineers who really have a clue about technology and design. Platinum Chief is right.

 

Unfortunately, the realities of launching a console into the consumer market constrain the realistic price point that can be targeted. And while it'd be great to have the best of everything in a console, this remains a business where a company has to be able to generate a profit in order for the product to survive.

They've already committed to having solid state storage in the console which is still relatively costly for a consumer oriented machine that is likely going to be less than 500 USD. HBM isn't cheap to include, especially in the amounts that the next gen. consoles are targeting.

While I've been a huge proponent of the benefits of HBM WRT performant SOCs with integrated graphics, that's always been with the knowledge that this would likely be limited to machines costing over 1k USD. Likely significantly more than 1k USD. In other words, the most likely first implementations would either be gaming laptops or laptops geared towards professional markets that would benefit from that amount of bandwidth.

That's territory that would be suicidal for any console maker to seriously target.

Of course, I'd be very pleasantly surprised if it makes it into either console as the main memory pool.

Regards,
SB

 

Looks like some intermediate development test rig. These things are made one-off for testing, so don't read too much into it.

 

Would you rather have a much more expensive console that performs identically but uses hbm memory instead of gddr6?

 

Maybe it's the idea that GPU's are going to be HBM2/3, but then again so is Zen 3 coming too. Wanting the latest is abit far fetched maybe.

 

Precisely. Perhaps if we had some evidence that Navi would perform better with vastly improved memory bandwidth, but I don't think the evidence is there.

 

I meant the huge metal thing, in the center of the shot, with lots of badass wires attached to it, apparently above the SOC. What's that for?

 

Power?

 

Cooling ? Debug?

 

It seems to be an open-top bga socket on a test fixture. A massive block of metal applying equal pressure on all contacts of a test chip, with pins individually spring loaded. It's for prototyping, or characterizing something, or burn testing, or binning... I assume the big wires would be for direct power delivery from external source. Without the VRMs soldered right besides the chip, they need gigantic wires for the testing (inductance issues otherwise). Test fixtures are usually just to gather some specific data. It's unrelated to the final product.

https://www.ironwoodelectronics.com/products/sockets/open_top_sockets.cfm

 

Yup. This puppy probably draws 80A+ on the core.

 

https://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1219/741/

Samsung talk about VNAND and SSD in next generation console and call it optimized NVme

 

They tested ps5 with hdd/sata ssd’s?

 

On PC i see a need for efficient SSD access using DirectX (or other API) abstraction.
Additionally MS would need to make it easy to shrink OS (or other) partition, so people can reserve some gigs for games, accessible only from DirectX but not from generic file systems.
Games could cache their stuff to that partition on first run, and the OS deletes older stuff when new games launch.
Still long startup times at first launch of a game, also sometimes as the player progresses to new areas, but overall it could compete next gen consoles?

 

You could easily support a dedicated SSD for games too. That'd be a lot easier to manage and would fit in with the enthusiast PC gamer's abilities to manage their system.

 

they dont mention the seconds for the optimized NVMe
Maybe they dont want to release specific details too early for competitive reasons?

 

I think the slides are about selling new SSDs to PC users as the consoles make SATA drives look slow.

 

Last few pages discussing Frame Rates spun off to this thread: https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/frame-rates-2019-edition-spawn.61470/

 

Write speeds are much slower.