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

Can someone with a $25000 oscilloscope tap a 7870's GDDR5 bus while playing (for science!) and make some nice graphs?

 

Add a zero to the figure (or at least multiply with 5), at least if you want to measure it with a traditional oscilloscope (I think there are specialized sampling oscilloscopes which are a bit cheaper).
Edit: You would want something like this (with the appropriate bandwidth of course). Check the prices!
Edit2: The one used here by Xilinx is the 20GHz version costing north of $160,000 (which is just the base price without the software packages and the necessary probes I guess), even as a refurbished unit.

 

I've got access to those, but I doubt my boss would be happy with that use

 

Just do it in the evening after he left . As long as you don't break anything (which is surprisingly easy if someone wonders why I bring this up), who's going to know it? "My" 2.5GHz scope (which was expensive enough) isn't going to cut it.

 

Anyone want to give me a PC with a 7870?

I haven't used an oscilloscope in a long time. If I knew what I was doing, and had the PC hardware, I'd probably try it out of curiosity.

 

Haven't used an oscilloscope since high school I think, and that unit was 100% analog, probably built back in the 1960s or somesuch and simple as hell even for its era...

Not sure a 7870 would be all that accurate as a measuring guide for a PS4 anyway, in a UMA system there's going to be more traffic on the memory bus compared to a PC graphics card. In any case, only a month and a half (soon!) to go. *bites nails feverishly*

 

Who wants to donate a PS4 to me for the purposes of science? I promise I will play a ton of games on it and get to the bottom of this.

 

At school we had labs filled with 10,000$ HP scopes for first year classes, such a wasted budget the students were practically using them as multimeter. At home all I could afford was an old B&K 1471 that I bought used for 100$. I had to "find" my signal

 

I once fried £12,500 worth of laptops on a test bench at work. My line manager was busy boring me to death with some wild story back from when he had a life, I was trying to seem interested and concentrate on setting up the test line for the burn in process. I ended up plugging a 15v feed in instead. The end result was like a little line of silicon dominos going up in clouds of smoke.

How we laughed...

 

£12,500 was a laughing matter? What kind of company are (were? ) you working at?

 

*cough* broke the internet *cough* for 150k customers.....

 

You guys spread havoc and you look happy! Where did you work at??? I want to work there too!

 

so volcanic island gpus have up to 8 aces

 

That looks a fair bit like a simplified version of that PS4 graphic, right?

 

Irrespective of whether or not this implies that PS4's GPU is at least partly Volcanic Islands based, the sheer fact that upcoming AMD GPUs will support PS4-ish compute features is huge. Probably means that asynchronous compute on PS4 will get used way earlier and more heavily than previously expected (given that a bunch of near-future desktop GPUs come with similar architectural design choices).

 

...and VI offers a dual-dma engine - looks cool.

 

Hawaii was stated to be the same IP generation as Bonaire, and console disclosures state the consoles are the same IP pool as Bonaire.

The more pressing question is whether Hawaii is VI, or if VI is a more meaningful designation than Sea Islands turned out to be.

 

IIRC, AMD introduced that particular feature in the HD5k or 6k series...

 

Do we know if the PS4 has them, or any AMD APU? It doesn't look very useful with unified memory...

 

In the PS4 Compute queues diagram there is a MIU / DMA block.