PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

[Hecatoncheires]

For clarification:

AMD's statement was:

"During a recent Gamescom 2013 interview, an AMD spokesperson made inaccurate statements regarding the details of our semi-custom APU architectures.
AMD will not comment on the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PS4 memory architectures and will not speak for Microsoft, Sony or other AMD customers."

That's it. The part with the Kabini was an interpretation of the journalist of the website. AMD never made a statement about Kabini with reference to the heise interview.

 

[liolio]

For clarification:

AMD's statement was:

"During a recent Gamescom 2013 interview, an AMD spokesperson made inaccurate statements regarding the details of our semi-custom APU architectures.
AMD will not comment on the Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PS4 memory architectures and will not speak for Microsoft, Sony or other AMD customers."

That's it. The part with the Kabini was an interpretation of the journalist of the website. AMD never made a statement about Kabini with reference to the heise interview.

Wow the "Press" quality is going down the sink... In this slow, decaying economic, I guess the silly season rhymes with the hunting for clicks season, ads revenues might be going down (and the willingness of corporations to a lot for ads), it seems that being professional and retain some credibility has taken the second seat (or further than that... like the rear of a bus).

Anyway I do get how a spoke person can misunderstand those info, even with to knowledgeable people here it seems tough make a proper guess without further, extremely technical, information.
Now a marketing guy the only thing that might be relevant to him is that Huma (nice "pr"-ologism) is the new "numbers of corez" as far as PR slides are concerned.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

AMD actual statement was (below), and not that gibberish BS in that link.



http://www.nowgamer.com/news/2052820/ps4_vs_xbox_one_amd_retracts_performance_comparison.html

Sounds like AMD is doing damage control ...for the 3rd time.

FYI: I have this strong feeling Marc Diana is telling the truth, but got busted on it - like a few others.

There's two ways you can interpret it if it's in relation to the comment that PS4 has hUMA while the Xbox One doesn't.

In order for that original claim to be "inaccurate," either...

1) Neither console has hUMA as AMD defines it.
or
2) Both consoles have hUMA as AMD defines it.

And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter as both consoles have some sort of memory coherency between the CPU and GPU. Neither Sony nor Microsoft are likely to be calling it hUMA even if it is hUMA.

Regards,
SB

 

[dobwal]

I don't under why AMD coined a cache coherency system hUMA when its HSA as a whole that ultimately enables UMA on a chip. Wouldn't a better term be hUCA or is it taken?

 

[Cyan]

I don't under why AMD coined a cache coherency system hUMA when its HSA as a whole that ultimately enables UMA on a chip. Wouldn't a better term be hUCA or is it taken?

What does hUCA stand for? Then... again... what about Hocus Pocus? Don't be surprised if you notice a lot of frequent name changes over the next 3 months. We can try to go through as many terms for hUMA as we can for the rest of August, September and October.

For now hUMA is just a fictional term for me. And I'm not one to go to into details about how technologically advanced it is.

Cheers

 

[Scott_Arm]

If they were adequate, we wouldn't get leaks or statements that show a single individual in the company synthesizing data from both sides. Maybe, per South Park, there are Forum Mongol Warriors that pop up whenever someone builds a Console Chinese Wall.

Chinese Holes? Sounds dirty.

 

[Esrever]

When a website can't even produce a direct quote, its probably not true and its spinning things for hits. At this point I doubt either console will support HUMA.

 

[firstminion]

Leaks are bad enough, but leaks that reveal a less than adequate isolation of design groups hurts everyone involved.
AMD staff being named as blabbing a comparison is also not good.

It could actually be show that AMD was capable of isolating the info enough that xbone is hUMA capable and that representative didn't know of it.

But either way, I wouldn't expect much for that representative future in the company.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

I don't know if it adds anything new to the things we already know.

http://www.vgleaks.com/playstation-4-includes-huma-technology/

Edit: Actually is very detailed.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

I don't know if it adds anything new to the things we already know.

http://www.vgleaks.com/playstation-4-includes-huma-technology/

Edit: Actually is very detailed.

Well, interesting. It seems cpu can also process data gpu sent to GDDR5 via GARLIC ( but it will be slower thatn with ONION as the data is not cached ), so it seems there isn´t indeed two memory regions, one only for GPU and one for CPU+GPU.

PS4 architecture is beautiful, isn´t it?.

 

[Arwin]

I don't know if it adds anything new to the things we already know.

http://www.vgleaks.com/playstation-4-includes-huma-technology/

Edit: Actually is very detailed.

Good, that filled in the blanks for me on how the memory reservation works. It's a bit more expansive than the Ubisoft programmer suggested, more different types of memory options.

 

[dumbo11]

I don't know if it adds anything new to the things we already know.

http://www.vgleaks.com/playstation-4-includes-huma-technology/

Edit: Actually is very detailed.

It seems to be a very nice explanation of the PS4 cache changes... but oddly the article doesn't explain if the PS4 has hUMA, nor why the XB1 doesn't.

(to be fair, the problem is mostly that hUMA seems rather ill-defined - it may be AMDs name for a new memory interface, or a marketing term for GCN1.05 rather than a technology per-se)

 

[Deleted member 7537]

It seems to be a very nice explanation of the PS4 cache changes... but oddly the article doesn't explain if the PS4 has hUMA, nor why the XB1 doesn't.

(to be fair, the problem is mostly that hUMA seems rather ill-defined - it may be AMDs name for a new memory interface, or a marketing term for GCN1.05 rather than a technology per-se)

VGLeaks seems to have a very detailed knowledge of both arquitectures, i wouldn't be surprised if they made an articule regarding "hUMA" on ONE too.

 

[McHuj]

It seems to be a very nice explanation of the PS4 cache changes... but oddly the article doesn't explain if the PS4 has hUMA, nor why the XB1 doesn't.

I think this is the key slide:

My interpretation is PS4 would have hUMA because both CPU/GPU see the same, entire memory. X1 would be something inbetween NUMA/hUMA because while both the CPU/GPU can see the same memory, only the GPU can see the dedicate memory.

 

[Scott_Arm]

It seems to be a very nice explanation of the PS4 cache changes... but oddly the article doesn't explain if the PS4 has hUMA, nor why the XB1 doesn't.

(to be fair, the problem is mostly that hUMA seems rather ill-defined - it may be AMDs name for a new memory interface, or a marketing term for GCN1.05 rather than a technology per-se)

huma is not a memory interface. It's their implementation of HSA.

 

[3dilettante]

VGLeaks seems to have a very detailed knowledge of both arquitectures, i wouldn't be surprised if they made an articule regarding "hUMA" on ONE too.

They apparently have a lot of documentation for Sony.
With all the discussion of explicit application cache invalidation, I'm not sure from the disclosed information what makes this hUMA.
The GPU and CPU apparently don't need to keep track of each other's page tables, but that detail is vague enough to make me uncertain if this is a difference from Durango, which was disclosed to use synchronized pages at least for coherent data.

The selective line invalidation is an efficiency gain, but I don't see it fundamentally offering something more coarse invalidates do, especially since both are being done by application instructions.

 

[dumbo11]

huma is not a memory interface. It's their implementation of HSA.

The documentation here is very haphazard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit#Heterogeneous_System_Architecture

In that diagram AMD has split HSA implementation into 3 stages:
- Optimized Platform (2012).
- Architectural Integration (2013).
- System Integration (2014).

hUMA could be the 2013 block, which is basically a set of improvements to the "memory subsystem" of their APUs?

 

[dobwal]

I think this is the key slide:

My interpretation is PS4 would have hUMA because both CPU/GPU see the same, entire memory. X1 would be something inbetween NUMA/hUMA because while both the CPU/GPU can see the same memory, only the GPU can see the dedicate memory.

Both can see the entire memory through the virtual memory system. I have seen nothing that says the PS4 cpu and gpu can physically address the entire memory system.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Both can see the entire memory through the virtual memory system. I have seen nothing that says the PS4 cpu and gpu can physically address the entire memory system.

Well, the article says CPU can access Garlic memory.

 

[anexanhume]

Good, that filled in the blanks for me on how the memory reservation works. It's a bit more expansive than the Ubisoft programmer suggested, more different types of memory options.

Is there anything here to suggest that some type of memory operation you would want to do (because it's the optimal way), isn't possible here? Seems they have all bases covered with coherency where needed and cache invalidation only where necessary.