Blazkowicz
Legend
4 cores and 16 threads is equally possible, I bet on that.
it's probably better than a worse cpu with more cores.
it's probably better than a worse cpu with more cores.
Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech
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bgassassin
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Something I had been thinking is that maybe they are copying Bulldozer, but are using AMD's "CMT" on Jaguar cores. So depending on a person's interpretation it could be 16 threads or 16 cores. Everything I/we have been hearing points so far to MS using x86.
itsmydamnation
Veteran
imo it would be far more likely for steamroller to have 3 ALU's with SMT per core then to completely redesign the way bobcat works for jaguar. AS i asked before given that bulldozer has lots of register renaming and pointers etc is going to SMT a logical next step or a whole pile of additional work?
Why is everyone convinced they are moving away from power PC? If you want a lot of float performance with relatively small core why not do something similar to last time? Obviously OoO this time and hopefully 4-6 cores + hyperthreading plus VMX.
Unless AMD were giving there cores away whats the advantage?
Unless AMD were giving there cores away whats the advantage?
I don´t know if this might help, but lherre, who you know pretty well, told me the other day the xbox 3 won´t be using a Power PC.
No.
Who'd buy a new, expensive (even at your proposed lowest price) next-gen console to play XBLA games on it? That's silly. And games on demand, are you going to sit waiting for hours for the first level to download before you can play, only to likely have to wait hours again for level 2?
How much flash would this proposed console have anyway? Note that you don't get to stick in all that much before a small traditional HDD gets cheaper, and you wouldn't be able to fit more than a few levels of a next-gen game at most in on-board flash. What if you want to start over after you complete the game? The first levels would have been deleted to make room for the final ones. That's more waiting and downloading, and for some customers that'd eventually mean breaking their monthly data cap on their internet connection as well. Not a very tempting prospect.
External USB drives isn't a reliable option as people don't generally have those just lying about. Performance characteristics are iffy for many of these units (or simply a big dark unknown, which will complicate matters for devs), and DRM may also be an issue for publishers. It took YEARS for Nintendo to go along with sticking wiiware games on SD cards, and those actually have some primitive DRM shit built in (although I don't know if Nintendo actually uses that.)
anexanhume
Veteran
Actually part of my point. Just because they said it was launching didn't mean it was. And look how poor the launch lineup was still, even after that delay. Can you say Riiiiiiidddddggge Racer?
Probably both.
The FPU is already SMT, but the critical memory and retirement stages are passed over to the single-threaded integer cores.
AMD recognizes the utility of SMT, but it's been going for low-hanging fruit.
Designing and verifying a full SMT solution was difficult enough that AMD opted out of a solution that every other high-performance chip has gone to with great results.
I wonder if they have painted themselves into a corner with CMT because of that initial choice.
Adding SMT now to the integer side is problematic because the parts that are shared don't have room for 4 threads, and the integer side would need revamping because it would be too starved of resources if the only thing done was adding more threads.
Being so far up the creek with CMT makes me wonder if the full revamping of the integer side will be an Excavator change, although AMD's had years now to verify integer SMT if it wanted to give it a try with Steamroller.
AMD is pretty desperate to justify its new business model, and it does have stronger graphics IP than IBM. If Sony and Microsoft bought into heterogenous solutions, and Sony already bought into it for PS3, then AMD now has better consumer-level tech.
AMD could be more desperate now than IBM microelectronics was back then, especially if it is willing to use its crown jewel cores whereas IBM gave them crumbs.
I guess that could be it, AMD is pretty screwed in the high performance PC world which means there margins must be pretty terrible.
A bung of a few million to customize one of there designs could really help them and keep GF busy for years too.
Plus there GPUs are world class so that would sweeten the deal.
A bung of a few million to customize one of there designs could really help them and keep GF busy for years too.
Plus there GPUs are world class so that would sweeten the deal.
Decisions can be made that, when applied across tens of millions of units, can create or remove costs in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, and could weaken or strengthen presence in markets with hundreds of millions of potential customers.
What relationship is so happy that a company won't check to see if it can save a hundred million dollars? What executive is going to put "lost my employer the GDP of a small nation" on his resume?
What relationship is so happy that a company won't check to see if it can save a hundred million dollars? What executive is going to put "lost my employer the GDP of a small nation" on his resume?
Just what kind of internet connection you have? My internet download is faster than my optical drive, and by the second half of nextgen, this is how it will be for the majority of city-dwellers. A pure on-demand machine with not even any flash and 8GB of ram should be able to fill it's ram in a little more than a minute with a Gbit connection. Seek latencies from a CDN should be ~half of what they would be from a bluray. A rage-style indirect texturing game should be able to drop you into the world in less than 5 seconds from game start.
They never really intended to launch in March of 2006, it was all a smoke screen, much like their entire 2005 E3 presentation.
I was thinking in "options", a model without disc drive, but you can add it later, the same for hard drive.
That's probably a discussion in itself. At the beginning of PS3, there was PR talk of a close partnership and future product collaborations. Didn't even get an nVidia GPU in PSP's successor, let alone a Cell with nVidia-designed rasterising units or something.
Aah crap, we're in "The Sims".. Please, God, don't accidentally remove the door in my house?
Decisions like that would impact what hardware a game can assume even if later they became standard.
If there is no standard HDD for example, a game can't rely on caching to it, or installing on it and so has to restrict itself to whatever the throughput of the delivery mechanism is (optical disk/network/whatever).
Same is true for SSD to some extent, it's unlikely that any shipped SSD would be large enough for installs, so at best it would be a data cache, which with limited write cycles might be an issue in and of itself.
bkilian hasn't been hinting at anything, bkilian is just enjoying arguing and muddying the waters. I'm South African, we love arguing, and will often take an opposing viewpoint just to see where it goes
Oh, I'm pretty sure they wanted to launch in March. Unfortunately, the Blu-ray specifications took longer to finalize than they thought. The first Blu-ray player launched in June. Blue-laser production was _extremely_ limited throughout 2006.
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