Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[MarkoIt]

Perspective.It was just a fun exercise to see where we're at in terms of silicon tech, die space, power, and performance after ~4 years. sigh, anyways. If you'd like to contribute, feel free by comparing current silicon area costs. Really now.

Roughly, Xenos has the same die-size and TDP of Juniper.

Juniper is about 5 times Xenos in terms of raw performance.

 

[AlNom]

Roughly, Xenos has the same die-size and TDP of Juniper.

Juniper is about 5 times Xenos in terms of raw performance.

Indeed, so bring on the numbers. The idle power consumption in practise would be interesting in that the 360 OS is still using 3D acceleration. And arguably doing a fair bit more than Aero Their concern will be thermal dissipation. Right now the 5770 needs a fairly beefy solution that would take a considerable amount of space, and it still has quite a temperature. Even then, for a console it would have to do it for potentially 24-36 hours of operation at load to pass QA.

Looking back at the RROD issues, a similar TDP may not be desirable. It's worth considering that heatsinks are not just a material cost, but also weight, particularly when you're going to be shipping 40 million+ units. Sure the heatsink may be reduced in size over the course of those units, but you're still starting out "big" i.e. later sizes will not be as small as they could have been. It's in their interests to cut costs, which led in part to RROD. And making the console bigger is probably not a great goal either.

 

[corduroygt]

Because the area dedicated to legacy X86 as a proportion of total die area is declining with time and X86 probably has some of the greatest investment in terms of power/watt and overall performance/mm^2 as well as excellent power management features which could save 2000+KW/h over the lifetime of the console. In addition to this, X86s strengths best compliment unified GPUs relatively speaking compared to the POWER range of processors.

1. About 10-15% of the i7 is still x86 decoding, why bother having this?
2. Why bother having MMX/SSE type vector instructions on a console cpu core (that take up a lot of area) when you could have them in fp/stream processor/gpu cores that would run much more efficiently?
3. Power efficiency is not an x86 exclusive, AMD's TSMC 40nm GPU's are an example of this, with power states, etc. Not to mention it's not that crucial on a console since few people leave it on unless they're playing a game, hence using the CPU/GPU power.
4. x86 processors come with a lot of baggage, all a console CPU needs to do is reasonable integer and branching performance, all else should be done on floating point/stream processors/gpus.

 

[Squilliam]

1. About 10-15% of the i7 is still x86 decoding, why bother having this?
2. Why bother having MMX/SSE type vector instructions on a console cpu core (that take up a lot of area) when you could have them in fp/stream processor/gpu cores that would run much more efficiently?
3. Power efficiency is not an x86 exclusive, AMD's TSMC 40nm GPU's are an example of this, with power states, etc. Not to mention it's not that crucial on a console since few people leave it on unless they're playing a game, hence using the CPU/GPU power.
4. x86 processors come with a lot of baggage, all a console CPU needs to do is reasonable integer and branching performance, all else should be done on floating point/stream processors/gpus.

1. It isn't just sitting there as litteral wasted space, and as it is performing a useful function and does allow them to use some of the most efficient compilers in the industry so its probably doing a pretty good job. In addition to this, being able to prototype and get quality software out quickly is more paramount than having the fastest hardware for the dollar as seen in Xbox 360 and Wii this generation.

2. They aren't doing much harm where they are and they could probably prove their usefulness to compliment the strengths/weaknesses of the GPU model.

3.The X86 CPUs have power states whereas the server class POWER chips do not. You would want you console to be quiet for media playback, wouldn't you?

4. Its some positive baggage as well as some negative baggage. Its not a one way street here.

Overall the advantages of X86 lie in the front end of the generation with quicker to market software, ready to go hardware solutions whilst the advantage for say POWER lie in the mid to back half of the generation. For generation 0/1 games the ease of production and taking games which are already being prototyped on X86 and speeding them to market is paramount which is more important in gaining early momentum than better performance/price later in the generation. In addition to this if theres a massive ALU array slapped to the side of the X86 CPU it gives developers a friendly introduction to GPGPU without throwing them into the deep end.

 

[Rangers]

Indeed, so bring on the numbers. The idle power consumption in practise would be interesting in that the 360 OS is still using 3D acceleration. And arguably doing a fair bit more than Aero Their concern will be thermal dissipation. Right now the 5770 needs a fairly beefy solution that would take a considerable amount of space, and it still has quite a temperature. Even then, for a console it would have to do it for potentially 24-36 hours of operation at load to pass QA.

Looking back at the RROD issues, a similar TDP may not be desirable. It's worth considering that heatsinks are not just a material cost, but also weight, particularly when you're going to be shipping 40 million+ units. Sure the heatsink may be reduced in size over the course of those units, but you're still starting out "big" i.e. later sizes will not be as small as they could have been. It's in their interests to cut costs, which led in part to RROD. And making the console bigger is probably not a great goal either.

I hope they shoot a lot higher than a current mid range GPU.

Xenos at the time of it's release was in the class of the high end PC GPU's of November 2005. I hope that's the case again with next gen.

Cypress at least doesn't seem to have huge power issues. GF100 is another story. But that's another reason Nvidia is looking to be a really bad choice to be in a console nowdays. Which obviously affects Sony more than MS.

 

[corduroygt]

1. It isn't just sitting there as litteral wasted space, and as it is performing a useful function and does allow them to use some of the most efficient compilers in the industry so its probably doing a pretty good job. In addition to this, being able to prototype and get quality software out quickly is more paramount than having the fastest hardware for the dollar as seen in Xbox 360 and Wii this generation.

2. They aren't doing much harm where they are and they could probably prove their usefulness to compliment the strengths/weaknesses of the GPU model.

3.The X86 CPUs have power states whereas the server class POWER chips do not. You would want you console to be quiet for media playback, wouldn't you?

4. Its some positive baggage as well as some negative baggage. Its not a one way street here.

Overall the advantages of X86 lie in the front end of the generation with quicker to market software, ready to go hardware solutions whilst the advantage for say POWER lie in the mid to back half of the generation. For generation 0/1 games the ease of production and taking games which are already being prototyped on X86 and speeding them to market is paramount which is more important in gaining early momentum than better performance/price later in the generation. In addition to this if theres a massive ALU array slapped to the side of the X86 CPU it gives developers a friendly introduction to GPGPU without throwing them into the deep end.

1. Both consoles have existing compilers for PPC architecture and the state of the tools is quite good by now I heard. New tools would just build upon the existing console dev tools, and not use existing PC tools, so time to market would indeed be minimal since multi threading is now expected as standard unlike 2005. So an evolution of the current architecture would be just fine, since most of the optimization for games is not the cpu but on the gpu side anyway. Having 15% of the die for useless instruction decoding is a waste where you could use the same die area for floating point calculation that'd be much faster with a dedicated unit, or more cache.
2. They're taking up silicon while not being as efficient as a dedicated stream processing unit.
3. Console chips would not be server class POWER chips, just like they aren't in this generation. Adding power states is doable with a new design as ATI showed with the 5000 series and neither the 360 or PS3 are loud and hot when playing back movies (except the 360 DVD drive) As I said before power saving features are not exclusive to x86.
4. It's a net negative baggage, such complex x86 backward compatible design is not needed.

You seem to have the opinion that a console should be just a PC from its launch year with an x86 cpu and a GPU. We saw how that ended up with the xbox, with intel and nvidia screwing over MS. A console should have a little more custom hardware since unlike a PC it never needs to run databases or business applications.

Console development should not be influenced by PC development, the less it is, the better the games are. If anything, games should be consoles first, since that's where the money is, then maybe later ported to PC and we're seeing that happen this gen, but slowly.

 

[aaronspink]

Indeed, so bring on the numbers. The idle power consumption in practise would be interesting in that the 360 OS is still using 3D acceleration. And arguably doing a fair bit more than Aero Their concern will be thermal dissipation. Right now the 5770 needs a fairly beefy solution that would take a considerable amount of space, and it still has quite a temperature. Even then, for a console it would have to do it for potentially 24-36 hours of operation at load to pass QA.

You do realize that PowerColor is currently shipping a passively cooled 5750 with no additional power connectors and they've been showing off a 5770 passively cooled with no power connectors at recent trade shows.

 

[Acert93]

Also, is the 360 RRoD issues straight up heat related or it is a material fabrication issue like bumpgate? If the later it doesn't mean heat itself was the issue, although it does accelerate the demise of the chip.

 

[AlNom]

You do realize that PowerColor is currently shipping a passively cooled 5750 with no additional power connectors and they've been showing off a 5770 passively cooled with no power connectors at recent trade shows.

Any thermal results on those, btw I don't follow SKUs that often. The time in between upgrades on my PC was about... 5 years.

But yeah, Xenos was passively cooled on a relatively dinky heatsink, then eventually received an added the heatpipe and extra aluminum fins. *shrug*

Also, is the 360 RRoD issues straight up heat related or it is a material fabrication issue like bumpgate? If the latter it doesn't mean heat itself was the issue, although it does accelerate the demise of the chip.

Directly or indirectly, one less thing to add to the mix would be nice.

 

[Acert93]

I think the point he was making on the power connector is that the GPU isn't a power hog.

 

[AlNom]

See edit above! ^

 

[aaronspink]

Any thermal results on those, btw I don't follow SKUs that often. The time in between upgrades on my PC was about... 5 years.

Well its under 75W since its using only the PCIe connector and nothing else.

 

[BadTB25]

1. Both consoles have existing compilers for PPC architecture and the state of the tools is quite good by now I heard. New tools would just build upon the existing console dev tools, and not use existing PC tools, so time to market would indeed be minimal since multi threading is now expected as standard unlike 2005. So an evolution of the current architecture would be just fine, since most of the optimization for games is not the cpu but on the gpu side anyway. Having 15% of the die for useless instruction decoding is a waste where you could use the same die area for floating point calculation that'd be much faster with a dedicated unit, or more cache.
2. They're taking up silicon while not being as efficient as a dedicated stream processing unit.
3. Console chips would not be server class POWER chips, just like they aren't in this generation. Adding power states is doable with a new design as ATI showed with the 5000 series and neither the 360 or PS3 are loud and hot when playing back movies (except the 360 DVD drive) As I said before power saving features are not exclusive to x86.
4. It's a net negative baggage, such complex x86 backward compatible design is not needed.

You seem to have the opinion that a console should be just a PC from its launch year with an x86 cpu and a GPU. We saw how that ended up with the xbox, with intel and nvidia screwing over MS. A console should have a little more custom hardware since unlike a PC it never needs to run databases or business applications.

Console development should not be influenced by PC development, the less it is, the better the games are. If anything, games should be consoles first, since that's where the money is, then maybe later ported to PC and we're seeing that happen this gen, but slowly.

For MS at least, aren't they aiming for code to be easily utilized/transparent on PC and X360 and its successor? I thought that was the point of XNA.

I recall a recent vid that showed a game that was played on the X360 or PC and then continued on a WM7 phone fairly seamlessly.

 

[liolio]

For power consumption and thermal dissipation I found those results they are from HARDWARE.FR

Below the set-up:
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica]Intel Core i7 975 (HT et Turbo disable)
Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme
6 Go DDR3 1333 Corsair
Windows 7 64 bits[/FONT]
power consumption for the whole system: 129Watts up to 287Watts

temperatures: 41°C up to 84°C

I'll search result for the powercolor hd5750, I'll edit if I find a good enough test.

EDIT
Looks like it's not allowed to link result the way I did so I'll just type the revelant results (actually I don't understand what mean hotlinking so this may explain that ). By the way I found a review of the powercolor hd5750.
The heat sink are beefy.

the complete card:

The complete review can be read @ techpowerup.com
Beside they didn't measure temperature.

EDIT 2
the card is pretty expansive for a HD5750 ~149$
In regard to power consumption figure I found the one from hardware.fr more relevant as they are for the whole system and take in account power supply inefficiency, etc so a quad-core +a HD5750 seem to be the highest conf one would use for a console, even a HD5770 based system goes higher than 300Watts in charge. Manufacturers could live with it but I doubt they will.

 

[Mobius1aic]

Sticking with PPC will keep backwards compatibility easy. While BC proprietors seem to be a bit overzealous, it's a nice feature to have, especially if you make downloadable games available, and new users can have something else to play on the same system when there are dry spells in new software during those first few months to a year.

As for that passive cooler 5750, damn that's a huge heat sink. Wow, four heat pipes on that puppy and it needs two slots worth of real estate.

 

[liolio]

Earlier I spoke about the new Intel i3 530 processor (which include an IGP on the same package as the CPU) source: ANANDTECH review
The chip:

Power consumption for the whole system ~70Watts
Performances are low by nowadays standards but it still achieve ~170 FPS @1680*1050 max image quality no AA in Batman Arcane Asylum...
Basically that why I think that an Intel solution may prove competitive, I made a gross calculation earlier and you could fit on top of the two nehalem cores ~twelve larrabee cores.
Here some gross calculations:

Spoiler

Die size: 530(mm²)/32(cores)x12(cores)x0.6(from 45nm to 32nm)=119mm² i3 alone is 81mm²)

Raw/peak throughput (in FLOPS for what it's worse):
@1.5GHz: 576GFLOPS @2GHz: 768GFLOPS
For reference, you can have ~an Athlon X2+ a redwood for the same silicon budget:
@650MHz: 520GFLOPS @775MHz: 620GFLOPS

Overall real word efficiency aside Intel solution doesn't look bad, I don't how costly it would be for Intel to add to larrabee cores power saving measure found in new nehalem).

 

[liolio]

Sticking with PPC will keep backwards compatibility easy. While BC proprietors seem to be a bit overzealous, it's a nice feature to have, especially if you make downloadable games available, and new users can have something else to play on the same system when there are dry spells in new software during those first few months to a year.

As for that passive cooler 5750, damn that's a huge heat sink. Wow, four heat pipes on that puppy and it needs two slots worth of real estate.

BC is interesting but I'm not sure that Nintendo aside it will be the main factor behind manufacturers decisions. We saw this gen that manufacturers and editors no longer care, re selling old games (revamped or not) is more profitable (obviously).
They will decide first on price then on overall perfs and I feel like security will be an important factor too. Clearly nowadays X86 CPUs are really good but I see less and less intensive for Intel and AMD tho sell them for cheap, so some POWER7 derivatives may end a better option for everyone.

 

[TheWretched]

Earlier I spoke about the new Intel i3 530 processor (which include an IGP on the same package as the CPU)
Power consumption for the whole system ~70Watts
Performances are low by nowadays standards but it still achieve ~170 FPS @1680*1050 max image quality no AA in Batman Arcane Asylum...

Wait, are you suggesting that the Intel GPU inside Arrandale etc. can outperform my 8800GTS or my (Core i3 laptop with ATI 5650) notebook? I really don't think so!

 

[Squilliam]

1. Both consoles have existing compilers for PPC architecture and the state of the tools is quite good by now I heard. New tools would just build upon the existing console dev tools, and not use existing PC tools, so time to market would indeed be minimal since multi threading is now expected as standard unlike 2005. So an evolution of the current architecture would be just fine, since most of the optimization for games is not the cpu but on the gpu side anyway. Having 15% of the die for useless instruction decoding is a waste where you could use the same die area for floating point calculation that'd be much faster with a dedicated unit, or more cache.

Except they would need new compilers because its quite likely they will move from POWER 4 based architectures to POWER 7 which are not binary compatible and are out of order executing. In addition to this, its not like the POWER architecture is without its own legacy shackles so its not 15% vs 0% in this comparison although I don't know the real numbers.

The other great advantage for X86 is that developers could prototype their games without having access to the hardware which is a huge advantage for fledgling developers in the important Xbox Live Arcade space and for developers coming from Europe and Asia especially who may not have experience with IBM POWER architectures, nor have access to the right tools.

Finally they could probably speed up the time it takes between revealing a new architecture to developers and the time it takes to get from prototype to market by using pre-existing technology. With IBM they need at least a lead time of 12-18 months to actually design the hardware and once they begin the process flexibility in final implementation is more limited.

2. They're taking up silicon while not being as efficient as a dedicated stream processing unit.

It depends on the task they are asked to perform.

3. Console chips would not be server class POWER chips, just like they aren't in this generation. Adding power states is doable with a new design as ATI showed with the 5000 series and neither the 360 or PS3 are loud and hot when playing back movies (except the 360 DVD drive) As I said before power saving features are not exclusive to x86.

No they aren't, but power efficiency is becoming more important. They don't want their console to get a black mark in the EU for being a power hog for instance.

4. It's a net negative baggage, such complex x86 backward compatible design is not needed.

That depends on who you ask. The X86 architecture on its own is pretty good by all accounts relative to other competing architectures.

You seem to have the opinion that a console should be just a PC from its launch year with an x86 cpu and a GPU. We saw how that ended up with the xbox, with intel and nvidia screwing over MS. A console should have a little more custom hardware since unlike a PC it never needs to run databases or business applications.

That was attributed to a raw deal they made and mistakes in implementing their architecture. The PS3 for example uses a server CPU and desktop graphics chip, it is in essence more of the PC than the Xbox 360. Theres no need to re-invent the wheel, only optimizations which are specific to consoles are needed like for instance embedded ram and memory architectures.

Console development should not be influenced by PC development, the less it is, the better the games are. If anything, games should be consoles first, since that's where the money is, then maybe later ported to PC and we're seeing that happen this gen, but slowly.

Why not? The technology used in console games is often first prototyped by PC developers, and only PCs have the advanced technologies available to even start using features like tessellation, GPGPU etc which will become important next generation console features.

 

[3dilettante]

Except they would need new compilers because its quite likely they will move from POWER 4 based architectures to POWER 7.

That's not how it went with the current gen.
None of the PowerPC-derived chips used resembles POWER4 or POWER5, and not even the POWER6 which did borrow a few of the circuit and pipeline ideas that Xenon and the PPU tried out.

That was attributed to a raw deal they made and mistakes in implementing their architecture. The PS3 for example uses a server CPU and desktop graphics chip, it is in essence more of the PC than the Xbox 360.

Cell would have been a horrific server chip. At least the 360's chip had 3 symmetric cores with a shared memory model.