NGGP: NextGen Garbage Pile (aka: No one reads the topics or stays on topic) *spawn*

I'm saying that those 4 CU are not hardware balanced as the 14, and I'm saying that they cannot give a valid help in graphics
I'm NOT saying that those 4 CU are useless for other tasks
I'm saying that 14 CU vs 12 CU means +16%power compunting in graphics, and they need to be 14 magic CU in order to compute more than double pixels than 12 not-so-magic CU (i'm joking, the CU's have same flops, but the 12 from durango have a better local cache per CU)

so there never will be a 720P vs 1080P difference, it's out of this world. forget it.
you can have 900 ROP's but you have to crunch more than 2x the number of pixel, and you need CU to compute it, is enough clear?

this is not gaf, so you are called to talk about tech (if you can, of course) and not to attack persons. thanks

 

And if your not compute bound on those pixels but instead fill bound?. Or what if your both on Durango, and neither on Orbis?.

The other 4 are practically identical to the other 14. I can tell you this now 'not hardware balanced' is gjberish and makes no sense.

 

I would like to know why people say these 4 CUs are going to be use for rendering/physics etc. can someone explain please?

 

The leak information said the system was 14+4 cu's, balanced for 14 with the 4 being a minor benefit for graphics. Although it was worded awkwardly and could be interpreted differently.

 

thank you! lets hope someone with access to orbis dev kits can explain these 4CUs function.

 

if you wait till the 20th of this month, maybe sony itself will tell something about

 

So let me get this straight. 14 versus 12 is close enough not to even matter, but somehow 18 versus 14 is such a big gain that the specs saying it's a "minor boost" means they actually do nothing. I love that. As far as I'm concerned, 12 and 14 are both minor, and only 18 is major.

 

14 are hardware balanced, 4 are not, so 4 are only minor help in graphics and no, there's nothing like "18 CU hardware balanced"
so please define what means "18 is major" (if referred to the number of CU's and not the number 18 alone)

 

It could well be that those 4 are otherwise engaged. ie. They could help with graphics but they are busy handling 3d interpolation for pseye as bkilian suggested. Or anything really, it seems odd to have that information included if it wasn't something. Or it's just awful wording and the 4 Cu's are special.

 

Pretty much, that is what this thread has degraded to. Lots of silly predictable arguments by an extremely vocal few who in many cases want to shout down any reasoned discussion and waste everyone's time by posting selectively parsed information.

To your point, I've seen a few post where people have attempted to use memory and bandwidth to determine what roll the 4 CUs might play and that makes most sense to me.

 

I think you are interpreting it wrong, they would all be practically identical and the GPU is hardware balanced to have 14 used as Graphics and 4 used as GPGPU that does not mean that the other 4 are different.

It would really make for a weird GPU having 4 units like that, that are radically different to the rest of them and it really does not make any sense to do. However them saying that using 14 for rendering and 4 for Physics does make sense as there may be a limitation somewhere under some situations in which throwing more computer power at something does nothing.

For example when your filtrate or bandwidth limited then more compute really isn't going to do anything.

 

<p>What Im seeing is everybody is interpreting vgleaks as each one want, both sides.</p>

 

The balanced comment is weird if you look at the whole system. Why is it balanced for 14, it doesn't really have less rops/cu or bandwidth than a comparable graphics card even with 18cu. So how is it balanced for 14?

 

Yeah. There's a lot of awful wording in there like "arquitecture" and "bandwith" and "some people is confused". It could be a case of lost in translation.
I'm more believing the idea that they'll end up close enough because these info are old. It wouldn't surprise me that MS bump it to 850MHz and pay for the initial lower yield, if that's possible.

 

No idea, but I did find something in the vgleaks article that kinda shoots down the entire 'extra 4 are useless at graphics'.

It says each CU in the details section, which obviously means all of them. That includes the 4 on the other side of the 14 + 4.

 

If we can trust DaE, than something happened to Durango. And i still dont believe that Leaked specs at all from both. I think that the GPU in Orbis will probably end up a little weaker.

 

I like how this thread is degenerating into the 4 CUs being somehow incapable of matching the functionality of the other 12/14 CUs and each of the 18 CUs being somehow less capable than 12CUs.

Not to mention equating 8GB DDR3 + 32MB embedded RAM as a equal of 4GB GDDR5 in terms of bandwidth.


My personal feeling for the 4CUs is that they would be either equal or more capable parts than the other CUs.

From an engineering standpoint, modifying these CUs so that they end up sucking big time at what they're originally designed to do just doesn't make any sense. It also doesn't help YIELDS.
It ends up as sounding like a big engineering/manufacturing FAIL if this is the case.
IF they're modified, they should be MORE capable at doing certain stuff and retain their original functionality.
Remember. Design choices are always about tradeoffs. You shouldn't see design choices that accomplish less and costing more.
Modifying these CUs is in itself a COST. By logic they're more capable if this design choice is made.

A much more in-line proposal which also makes more sense would be to reserve them for certain functions when the computing power is required, and allow the devs to tap into them when they're not required.
In this case, the "4" would serve as a hard limit on how much CUs the other functions would take up so the developers will know that "in any case, we will still have 14 CUs to work with".

The breakdown argument from some people currently delving on the forum sounds like this
1. 14 CUs are used for graphics
2. 4 CUs are reserved for different functions
3. 4 CUs provide little to no help for graphics
4. 4 CUs can be released for graphics

Reading this through and it is clear that argument 3 and 4 shouldn't coexist if Sony engineers aren't plain drunk.

 

I like how people ignore parts of the rumor they don't like.

 

Or exaggerate parts of the rumor that they do like.

 

Please quote the part where they shut down the 4 CU as been useless like you claim,this is starting to sound like mayor nelson comment about cell on 2005 when he call Cell SPE a bunch of useless DSP's.

Now we know how useless spe were.