Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[french toast]

Well im not knowledge-able about such things, but i heard that AMD was seriously weighing it up for use on Tahiti..whether thats true or not who knows, but would make it interesting as we know AMD makes the loop/720 gpu.

One question, as we are talking about bandwith, and to break up the flame war brewing above would bringing the edam on xenos completely on die (instead of daughter) helped with the 360 performance?
or is 10mb too small to make much difference?
..has interesting connotations with regards to rumoured 64mb on 720 and what actual benefits it would provide.

 

[IllusionistK]

Not trying to be an ass here, but with your "connections", I don't think you are a neutral party in here to really assess this.

In terms of CPU, Disc Space, RAM bandwidth (if one ignores the eDRAM, which is severly limited in use), standard HDD etc...

Can you elaborate on what you mean in terms of CPU and Bandwidth; specifically workloads.

(Also, not sure what a storage medium apart from main memory, has to do with general use of the term 'outperforming')

 

[3dcgi]

Well im not knowledge-able about such things, but i heard that AMD was seriously weighing it up for use on Tahiti..whether thats true or not who knows, but would make it interesting as we know AMD makes the loop/720 gpu.

One question, as we are talking about bandwith, and to break up the flame war brewing above would bringing the edam on xenos completely on die (instead of daughter) helped with the 360 performance?
or is 10mb too small to make much difference?
..has interesting connotations with regards to rumoured 64mb on 720 and what actual benefits it would provide.

The XDR for Tahiti rumor was nothing but BS.

 

[bkilian]

Not trying to be an ass here, but with your "connections", I don't think you are a neutral party in here to really assess this.

And, to a degree, PS3 is vastly outperforming 360. In terms of CPU, Disc Space, RAM bandwidth (if one ignores the eDRAM, which is severly limited in use), standard HDD etc...

And that's not me saying PS3 is superior or anything, for all intends and purposes they are equally fast... or rather produce comparable results (speed doesn't really matter, then).

Though, if the "source" is real, then... why not? IF PS4 comes later and Sony doesn't fuck up with the GPU again, I might believe it.

Actually, since we're talking purely about rumors, what I do or don't know (or my "connections") is entirely irrelevant.

My point was that discussing the ephemeral concept of "power" (which as we've seen in the last 5 years, is a difficult concept to measure) in relation to rumors seems a little premature. By all means, once we get some actual announcements, let's discuss the hell out of it

 

[SedentaryJourney]

Wouldn't that take the fun out of this thread? Rampant speculation fuelled by very little information is pretty much the point here.

 

[bkilian]

Oh yeah, sorry, you're absolutely right.

So the PS24 will totally beat the Xbox 129600's pants off. It'll have a Reality Synthesizer that'll actually Synthesize real Reality!!! Every time you play, it uses Quantum Mechanics to create a universe in which all the things in the game are real. The Xbox totally won't be able to match it, since their graphics chip doesn't have nearly as cool a name.

 

[rpg.314]

Though it could be for the repurposed 360 as a set-top box.

Yeah, that's what it is.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Wouldn't that take the fun out of this thread?

No. This thread is to discuss the possible hardware that we'll see, and not to try and determine which speculated hardware will be the most 'powerful'. "I heard this box will be more powerful than that box" doesn't really help identify what processors or RAM will be used, so serve no useful purpose here.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes the ps3 Hype up to the max to be twice the power of the 360, and blow it away..that was reflected in the price...

This isn't the thread for that discussion.

Regards XDR2, we've floated that idea for a good couple of years, but as others say there's no real-world evidence of XDR2's performance in a system, so we can only go by PR numbers. But if it works as well as suggested (and I believe XDR wasn't seeing adoption anywhere prior to PS3) then I don't see the point in combining it with DDR. A single XDR RAM pool will be fast enough for the whole system and simpler to implement. IMO it'd be the ideal solution to RAM, depending entirely on cost and performance which are unknowns. If XDR is too costly, then a small pool probably won't be cost effective anyway. May as well go with conventional DRAM and buy from a competitibve marketplace.

 

[AlNom]

Removed some noise. Come on folks, we know junk when we see it. You're smarter than that!... I thought.

 

[french toast]

This isn't the thread for that discussion.

Regards XDR2, we've floated that idea for a good couple of years, but as others say there's no real-world evidence of XDR2's performance in a system, so we can only go by PR numbers. But if it works as well as suggested (and I believe XDR wasn't seeing adoption anywhere prior to PS3) then I don't see the point in combining it with DDR. A single XDR RAM pool will be fast enough for the whole system and simpler to implement. IMO it'd be the ideal solution to RAM, depending entirely on cost and performance which are unknowns. If XDR is too costly, then a small pool probably won't be cost effective anyway. May as well go with conventional DRAM and buy from a competitibve marketplace.

Fair enough..couldnt resist

Yea i see what you mean not wanting to mess around with multiple pools of memory architectures, if xdr2 is legit a big chunk of that do nicely IMHO.

 

[SedentaryJourney]

No. This thread is to discuss the possible hardware that we'll see, and not to try and determine which speculated hardware will be the most 'powerful'. "I heard this box will be more powerful than that box" doesn't really help identify what processors or RAM will be used, so serve no useful purpose here.

Isn't that what I said? Possible hardware speculation is speculation. My point is that if you were to suspend discussion until "we get some actual announcements" as bkilian suggested then it's thread over basically.

Oh yeah, sorry, you're absolutely right.

So the PS24 will totally beat the Xbox 129600's pants off. It'll have a Reality Synthesizer that'll actually Synthesize real Reality!!! Every time you play, it uses Quantum Mechanics to create a universe in which all the things in the game are real. The Xbox totally won't be able to match it, since their graphics chip doesn't have nearly as cool a name.

I don't recall suggesting that we shouldn't distinguish between speculation and pure nonsense.

 

[Acert93]

Wouldn't that take the fun out of this thread? Rampant speculation fuelled by very little information is pretty much the point here.

I would hope the speculation would be fueled by educated derivatives based on current technologies, designs, roadmaps.

I agree with bkillian: Talking about a platform being faster than another based on VERY week rumors with nothing substantial to even define "power" and relative performance and the complete absence of other vital platform design choices (not just core type but number of cores, inter-core communication and caches... and then the memory sub-systems, GPU, and other design factors) is NOT what this thread is for.

If people have intelligent arguements for why they believe a company may go a direction with less or more performance based on technology and market factors then yes.

But the weaksause second grade level rumor mongering sites can get a swift kick to the crotch and an early exit to my first and only epic thread But really, it is not welcome at B3D and not in the spirit of this thread.

Ps- I will be ticked if Loop is the next real Xbox! But there is a thread to discuss that rumor and our feelings.

 

[IllusionistK]

What if, instead of EDRAM, we have a Tahiti XT core with an extra large pool of cache memory, say 16MB.

I would love to see something like 512MB of flexible EDRAM instead of the traditional setup.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Yes but I'd like it to cost less than $2000.

 

[upnorthsox]

I would hope the speculation would be fueled by educated derivatives based on current technologies, designs, roadmaps.

I agree with bkillian: Talking about a platform being faster than another based on VERY week rumors with nothing substantial to even define "power" and relative performance and the complete absence of other vital platform design choices (not just core type but number of cores, inter-core communication and caches... and then the memory sub-systems, GPU, and other design factors) is NOT what this thread is for.

If people have intelligent arguements for why they believe a company may go a direction with less or more performance based on technology and market factors then yes.

But the weaksause second grade level rumor mongering sites can get a swift kick to the crotch and an early exit to my first and only epic thread But really, it is not welcome at B3D and not in the spirit of this thread.

Ps- I will be ticked if Loop is the next real Xbox! But there is a thread to discuss that rumor and our feelings.

Haven't you just done the same thing? You've already prejudged an article that hasn't even been published yet.

 

[bgassassin]

What if, instead of EDRAM, we have a Tahiti XT core with an extra large pool of cache memory, say 16MB.

I would love to see something like 512MB of flexible EDRAM instead of the traditional setup.

Is this going in a console? I'd like to see how big that case would be.

 

[AlphaWolf]

This isn't the thread for that discussion.

Regards XDR2, we've floated that idea for a good couple of years, but as others say there's no real-world evidence of XDR2's performance in a system, so we can only go by PR numbers. But if it works as well as suggested (and I believe XDR wasn't seeing adoption anywhere prior to PS3) then I don't see the point in combining it with DDR. A single XDR RAM pool will be fast enough for the whole system and simpler to implement. IMO it'd be the ideal solution to RAM, depending entirely on cost and performance which are unknowns. If XDR is too costly, then a small pool probably won't be cost effective anyway. May as well go with conventional DRAM and buy from a competitibve marketplace.

XDR was sampled 3 years before the ps3 shipped. XDR2 has not yet been sampled, unless they've decided to keep it a secret, usually though if you want to sell something people need to know you can make it.

---
As for the article suggesting the more powerful ps4 based on the likelihood of MS including Kinect 2, that's not necessarily a proper line of thinking. Not including kinect in the box would probably cost them much more than including it. Just like the inclusion of blu-ray was important to Sony for the current generation of consoles, MS might have to pay a small cost up front for the inclusion of Kinect (how much will kinect 2 even cost to build? $30?), I doubt that it will significantly alter the hardware choices as I expect those will be more based on power consumption than the overall BOM at launch.

 

[french toast]

What if, instead of EDRAM, we have a Tahiti XT core with an extra large pool of cache memory, say 16MB.

I would love to see something like 512MB of flexible EDRAM instead of the traditional setup.

Im quite intrigued by the idea of some sort on on die cache with the gpu, i menntioned the xdr2 idea, but i havnt the knowledge to comment on what sort of size cache would be worthwhile..360 had 10mb on daughter die..which meant 250gb/s bandwith for some simple things like z stencil, AA, etc is that right?

I also read, maybe in an article here from dave baurman? that if you moved the cache completely on die, the whole gpu gets access to that bandwidth? is that correct?

So would putting say 20mb edram on that tahiti gpu be beneficial?
Then you could just unify the rest of the system with some high density/cheap GDDR3.

Would it be easy to implement?

 

[Acert93]

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