Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
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The real source of that text you are quoting is http://pastebin.com/5giPQP2r. Don't know how reliable it is. The recently leaked target specs, that are supposedly one year old don't include 2 gpu's. Also the use of gpu's with different architectures doesn't make sense to me. :-/
"Orbis will support 4 layer BR discs from day 1" Wow, kind of expected this. If this is true then i will be happy. 4 layer would be 128gb comparing with what we're getting now. Imaging if the ps4 is released early 2014 with a hvd drive, now that would be next-gen, but i'm sure Sony is sticking to it's blu-ray tech. One could dream i guess.
Sorry that's not clear to me. Do you state this as an opinion or heard something about it?
(I answer as if it were the former).
If it an opinion I don't think that having an APU is a bad idea. GCN architecture use significantly more transistors than previous arch. The increase was hidden from moving to 40 to 28nm.
On the APU front they are already @32 nm and just plan to move to 28nm.
I would favor something like 8 cores + 4 CUs because I don't think it makes that much sense to invest a lot of silicon in the GPU part of the GPU. (* so it would be 22 CU in total, main GPU being 18CUs).
Still I believe that an APU is a worthy investment.
First in the menu, media playback, non demanding PSN games, the main GPU could be turned off completely.
In high quality games I could see even only 4 SIMD providing quiet a boost/support to the CPU cores while letting the main GPU untouched (dedicated to Graphics only) either with "graphics" task (like low resolution depth only render target for occlusion, velocity buffer,/ whatever the devs found relevant and doesn't need high bandwidth), with particles and physics and some database traversals, etc.
That's ~400GFLOPS that could be used if needed (power killed otherwise), it not too shabby
it's more programmable crunching power than a 360 as a whole EDIT
WRT to the 7970 noise, nice thing is that the 7970M is indeed a pitcairn (20 CUs vs rumored 18 CUs). Would solve most discrepancies in what we are reading.
7970 in prototype make sense, ~ the same size, ~ the throughput, ~the same power consumption as the final chip.
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It wouldn't be necessary because of the process node, and without elaboration, I'd consider using the process node as a justification a strike against that rumor's credibility.
Little has been said about Steamroller, and less than that has been said of Jaguar, so I don't have anything concrete to say that it would be (edit: or not be) a good idea.
Only Steamroller has been identifed as being part of an HSA platform, but it may be possible for AMD to be paid to create a custom design that has Jaguar and HSA, assuming all of AMD's modular architecture talk wasn't hot air.
It's unclear what Sony's reasons would be for switching to a core that is best scaled way down to embedded and tablet, when Steamroller should do well at the typical envelope for console chips.
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I wonder if MS will deliver console with performance that are neck and neck like this gen. I think it will be hard. Spending more transistors on CPU, and having Kinect 2.0 boxed in every console should put its production costs higher than PS4 and I think they could decide to "cheap out" on GPU.
Although from GAF guy rumors about nextbox GPU being higher priority and new subscription way of selling the box they could maybe get away with it. Next months should be very interesting.
Although from GAF guy rumors about nextbox GPU being higher priority and new subscription way of selling the box they could maybe get away with it. Next months should be very interesting.
I believe finding a 7970 in PS4 has roughly a snowball's chance in hell of happening considering two things:
A: Sony pissing money down the drain in massive amounts. They couldn't afford it even if they wanted to.
B: 7900 series has heavy emphasis on GPGPU compute features, which are useless in a console and just more wasted trannies - which Sony can't afford in the first place.
So, I'll definitely believe this one when I see it, and not before then. Don't misunderstand - the hardware fanboy in me want to see it happen, but Sony took a big financial hit this round of consoles, has PS3 made Sony even a single dollar yet? Most quarters their gaming division has bled money like a battallion of stuck pigs.
B. The rumoured CPU performance is quite week (two modules) so the GPGPU may be their bet on the future in terms of getting adequate performance out of the box initially and relying upon GPGPU coding for future performance. In addition to this AMD may have cut them a deal in order to get them to use their GPU in that way to foster adoption of that coding paradigm. They may for instance benefit in terms of getting game developers to code specifically to their architecture.
That's wrong because consoles can use a GPGPU for a lot of things the motion tracking with the new cameras for 1 & some of the same things that they used the Cell's SPEs for.
Yeah, I would think (which doesn't say much) consoles would be the perfect candidate for good GPGPU performance. Closed boxes mean they can really tailor the technique to the box and avoid pit falls and the experiences gained works for a good 5-10 year window of titles. The GPU, for the right work loads, offers a potential speed up in some cases a magnitude + performance gains allowing techniques that are just not possible on a CPU. That is the advantage of a GPU having a ton of math units and fast caches.
Now the 64 bit stuff probably wouldn't be useful to most developers but GPGPU in general, IMO, is what offers a platform legs. Adding more CPU cores with 25-50GFLOPs each isn't really a solution for "legs." I think even at first a console with more CPU cores compared to another with less but that same budget dumped into GPU the CPU-heavy design won't be making better games as it is a challenge to get those CPU resources used where the GPU will soak up whatever you throw at it and long term the GPU heavy design has more compute power to throw at problems.
That is why I am hoping someone goes all out on a GPU design. If Sony has a 1.8TFLOPs GPU in the PS4 that is a step in the right direction IMO. Better than, say, 1TFLOPs...
Now the 64 bit stuff probably wouldn't be useful to most developers but GPGPU in general, IMO, is what offers a platform legs. Adding more CPU cores with 25-50GFLOPs each isn't really a solution for "legs." I think even at first a console with more CPU cores compared to another with less but that same budget dumped into GPU the CPU-heavy design won't be making better games as it is a challenge to get those CPU resources used where the GPU will soak up whatever you throw at it and long term the GPU heavy design has more compute power to throw at problems.
That is why I am hoping someone goes all out on a GPU design. If Sony has a 1.8TFLOPs GPU in the PS4 that is a step in the right direction IMO. Better than, say, 1TFLOPs...
bgassassin
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I was the one that called it weird in the first place. You don't have to explain that to me. :smile:
And of course it's not final. That's why I'm waiting till I know more before drawing any conclusions and have only used weird as a description.
I believe the issue is that the target specs came out last year. At the time the only known 7000-series GPU was Tahiti so that's most likely the reason why that label was used, but was made known it would have 18CUs. And we're looking at that being included in a custom APU.
An APU with 4 Int cores and a GPU with 18 CUs with full HSA and, theoretically, some stacked memory for a solid pool of memory with an insane amount of bandwidth would be a really well rounded, forward thinking design IMO in relation to the budget limitations provided. In my mind it is in the same vein as the Xbox 360 and, to a lesser degree, the GCN (in terms of philosophy). It may not be a brute force approach but it may have all the right stuff in the rights areas and, with stacked memory, enough pep in bottleneck areas to really shine for a long time.
Yeah, if the promise of HSA comes to fruition, that is to say, if it truly won't matter where your flops are, the PS4 as rumored sounds great. MS appears to be going CPU heavy, but if they're spending a lot of silicon to get a massively threaded 300-400 GFlop PowerPC design while Sony spends the same budget to get more than twice that in additional shader units, the PS4 sounds pretty good. And that's coming from someone who was a big proponent of going super-Cell.
The draw back is they could end up in a situation where developers are more comfortable with existing multi-threaded development paradigms than the GPGPU and Compute heavy approach the Sony design demands. The good news is Unreal 4 heavily relies heavily on compute, from what I understand, and even current gen development has seen more and more developers looking to leverage GPU resources for more than shading pixels.
The draw back is they could end up in a situation where developers are more comfortable with existing multi-threaded development paradigms than the GPGPU and Compute heavy approach the Sony design demands. The good news is Unreal 4 heavily relies heavily on compute, from what I understand, and even current gen development has seen more and more developers looking to leverage GPU resources for more than shading pixels.
The draw back might end up biting them pretty hard too. As their current architecture follows multi-threading (in a sense) and is now switching to compute. Now while compute isn't bad, there is an inherent problem of engine dependency. Not every engine is built around compute. This will however make for some heavily tessellated games if my speculation makes sense.
Ironic how the tables flipped and now Microsoft is going the CPU route and Sony the GPU route. Whereas it was the opposite this generation.
Love_In_Rio
Veteran
With all this talking about Xbox 720 CPU i remember seeing this photoshoped picture two months ago:
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/6506/surferibm05s021512.jpg
80Mb edram... something like a true power 7 with 4 ooo cores and 4 way SMT.... this sounds to me similar in power to the powerful CPU the rumors talk about.
Could it really be something similar?.
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/6506/surferibm05s021512.jpg
80Mb edram... something like a true power 7 with 4 ooo cores and 4 way SMT.... this sounds to me similar in power to the powerful CPU the rumors talk about.
Could it really be something similar?.
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New information from another source puts the Durango ram amount at 3-4 GB, and the processing power at 1 teraflop.
Everything is still flux, but the above specs, according to him, are certainties.
So in the past few month we've had,
6670 as gpu, 6x Xbox 360 in power
dual gpus
16 core CPUs
8 Core CPUs
6 Core CPUs
8 GB Ram
3-4 GB Ram
Yep, MS is spreading false leads.
Everything is still flux, but the above specs, according to him, are certainties.
So in the past few month we've had,
6670 as gpu, 6x Xbox 360 in power
dual gpus
16 core CPUs
8 Core CPUs
6 Core CPUs
8 GB Ram
3-4 GB Ram
Yep, MS is spreading false leads.
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