Next Generation Hardware Speculation with a Technical Spin [pre E3 2019]

Did Sweeney just spill the beans on what AMD is offering in their CES-keynote? "12-core consumer CPUs"

 

Who needs Vega 64 now that Navi 10 (RX 3080) which is only $250 in comparison with 15% performance advantage (equals to 14.5 TF) at 150 W TDP is a far more attractive candidate ? Downclock it a bit to 14 TF which will further reduce the TDP and cost just enough for a console, (I imagine Sony would get it way cheaper anyway) then tada we're in business! Damn this all adds up now, with the recent leaks of PS5 being 14 TF, I think cat is almost out of the bag.

 

I wouldn't buy every Internet rumour at a face value.

 

Which store can I find this Navi 10 RX 3080 from? Seriously though, I see what kinda logic some rumormills have applied to their "speculation" (guessing game) about Navi, but it's highly faulty logic.

 

I hope AMD's conference at CES would shed some light for us however I do have a good hunch about this.

 

Phil Spencer is on stage at AMD's CES keynote.
I guess all those doubts about Microsoft going with AMD for next-gent just disappeared.

EDIT: "We've been thinking about who our partners are, and we're keeping said AMD as a partner for future products we'll announce later."

Yup, he just double confirmed Xbox 4 with AMD.

 

yup

 

No Navi at CES . You can see that most of there engineering and budget had gone into Ryzen and Epyc. They have made massive gains in the CPU department, graphics not so much.

 

Does the fact that Ryzen 3 will also be a chiplet-based design have any implications on the potential for chiplet-based designs to make it into next-gen consoles?

 

If I didn't hear it wrong, she did mention that Navi would be coming later this year.

 

Yes, but people had been arguing that AMD would stick with monolithic designs outside of HEDT and Server designs and this definitively shows that chiplets are a viable solution down-market (it remains to be seen how far down). So, I was wondering if anyone had recalibrated their thinking any based on this reveal.

 

It’s certainly something to consider. If consoles could use off the shelf Zen 2 die and only need a custom GPU chiplet, that could be compelling for them.

 

I think so. I think the chances that next gen designs are chiplet based have gone up. I for one didn't expect AMD to release Ryzen 3 as a chiplet based design. I would have thought that the 8-core Ryzen 3 (and smaller chips) could have all come from a single die that's under 200mm. But I guess the economies of scale are too good to pass up for.

Now what I found even more interesting is the Vega VII board. 2080 performance for $699 with 16GB of HBM. Let's see how well that sells and how the price scales over the next year because that product gives me some hope of an HBM based console in 1.9 years. I didn't expect a gaming product like that anytime soon. Improve the power efficiency with Navi and throw in a chiplet on the interposer and you have a very compelling console with 1TB bandwidth.

 

That moment when a bunch of top-level developers say they can't wait to have 8 Zen cores as standard for consoles, specifically referring to AMD's architecture.

I guess these guys have been asking Intel to increase core count for consumer products for almost a decade now, and were given the middle finger while AMD couldn't compete.

 

Exactly this. If the PS5 is a Radeon VII level of performance, but using an architecture less gimped than Vega, I'll be a very happy chappy.

 

Skimming through the AMD conference, it's clear that ray tracing is not something they're thinking about. Or surely they would have been all over this? Does this kill any chance of RTRT in next gen consoles?

 

AMD is working on it. She didn't mention it on stage though. She says they'll have more to announce on RT later in the year. Citation below. Take of it as you will, but this pretty much reinforces for me that we'll be seeing hybrid ray tracing on next gen consoles. I'm leaning on MS here as we saw them on stage and large parts of DX12 is made with GCN architecture in mind, but i hope PS5 has it too. Machine Learning reinforces the entire azure business model. The whole industry moving towards machine learning for animation, AI up-res, etc, are all profitable for MS. Storage, processing, and data collection is their main business. The idea that next generation consoles can run AI models very quickly means there's opportunity for them to look at their current 360BC program, and for X2, run AI-up-resolution on textures and resolution. Third party companies will focus on content creation and leveraging AI to do all the modelling work so that studios only need to buy the service, much cheaper than constantly hiring tons and tons of animators and artists. All of it being processed of course on Azure, and a whole industry of content creation on Azure is where the big money for them will be.

We already know that AMD is a big part of Azure. We know the next Scarlett SoCs have some Azure links in them. We only need to bring this picture together and see how MS profits or maximizes the cost efficiency from all of this, and stop looking at it from a 'trying to beat' their competitors. They're trying to take home money and lots of it, hard to see MS pass up such an opportunity.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3332205/amd/amd-ceo-lisa-su-interview-ryzen-raytracing-radeon.html

“I think ray tracing is an important technology, and it’s something we’re working on as well, both from a hardware and software standpoint,” Su said. “The most important thing, and that’s why we talk so much about the development community, is technology for technology’s sake is okay, but technology done together with partners who are fully engaged is really important.”

Nvidia has received some criticism from enthusiasts concerning the price of its RTX cards and the relative of lack of game support at present. Su indicated that building a development ecosystem was important.

Later, Su expanded on her thought. “I don’t think we should say that we are ‘waiting,’” Su said, in response to this reporter’s question. “We are deep in development, and that development is concurrent between hardware and software.”

“The consumer doesn’t see a lot of benefit today because the other parts of the ecosystem are not ready,” Su added. [iroboto: DirectML is not ready for instance]