Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[(((interference)))]

ALU is probably referring to a vector unit (64 as opposed to the 48 in the 360) and Arm/x86 is probably denoting two possible options rather than a special hybrid Arm and x86 cpu.

I thought it was a typo and actually meant 640 ALUs?

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Surface is their experimental table device.

Just a heads up the tablet launch today.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/257852/microsoft_surface_tablet_initial_impressions.html

Microsoft Surface Tablet: Initial Impressions
Redmond has spared no detail in reconsidering what a tablet can, and should, be.


Microsoft's introduction of its Surface tablet engendered buzz like no other we've seen from Microsoft. The big question is, does it stand up to the hype? The answer, succinctly, is yes.


After the event, attendees got a brief audience with the Surface (the second Microsoft product to get that name; prior to today, "Surface" referred to Microsoft's table-top touchscreen computer experience). I saw it up-close, and in limited action, and was very impressed with what I saw.

 

[ultragpu]

I was thinking more along the lines of they might see "our competitor is shooting for a profitable launch at just 299??? Forget 4GB ram 2GB it is..., we're gonna need to keep those costs low..."

8 times xbox360 power is like 2.5TFlops right? Hasn't that already surpassed the rumored 1.8TFlops in Orbis? I'd say Sony better step onto it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Oh, sure. I just bristle at the suggestion that something doesn't merit any considerationl.

So you have no filters at all, and if someone were to post on a website somewhere a spec-sheet saying PS4 was to have 16 Power7 cores and 84 GBs RAM blah-blah, that it should be posted here and considered? Common sense has to apply to remove noise. The previous fake/real target had reasons to question its validity and reasons to discuss. This one doesn't - it's clearly fake from the outset. As these things are created to gain attention, the proper way to deal with them is give no attention.

It's not that this doesn't deserve consideration; it's that the initial consideration should have happened in the first viewing, been rejected as noise when it's as obvious as this, and the rumour not passed on.

 

[tunafish]

8 times xbox360 power is like 2.5TFlops right?

8x the raw power of the GPU is ~2TF. However, 8 the raw power with a GCN-class architecture would be much, much more than 8x the real performance. Efficiency has *at least* doubled, if not much more. I'd expect "8x performance" to mean something like 1TF chip.

 

[fehu]

Holy brand confusion Batman!

 

[ultragpu]

8x the raw power of the GPU is ~2TF. However, 8 the raw power with a GCN-class architecture would be much, much more than 8x the real performance. Efficiency has *at least* doubled, if not much more. I'd expect "8x performance" to mean something like 1TF chip.

I see now, so it does look grim judging by today's standard. I hope final spec would be much beefier.

 

[Rodéric]

I heard Next Gen will have integrated pizza oven !
You read it here first !


(Sorry, I couldn't resist ^^)

 

[jlippo]

I heard Next Gen will have integrated pizza oven !
You read it here first !


(Sorry, I couldn't resist ^^)

It certainly would be a novel idea to get rid of the excess heat..

 

[sebbbi]

That's fine if you have no shared state between any of your objects, but if that was the case, you wouldn't have much of a game. A lot of game logic has shared state and requires synchronization -- things like path planning, collision, AI (decision trees with dependencies). The most embarrassingly parallel part of a game is the rendering, and that's what we have GPUs for.

AI can be parallelized very well. Lets say you have for example 100+ enemies (we are talking about next gen game after all). The shared part of the game world can be considered to be static for the duration of the frame (except for the stages where updates are applied). All AI characters can do their pathfinding requests, visibility checks (ray casts) and decision making concurrently. These operations do not modify shared data, and thus require no synchronization whatsoever (multiple read accesses to same data structures require no synchronization).

Collision detection is also embarrassingly parallelizable. Just take a profile capture from any modern multithreaded physics engine (on a console), and you will notice it immediately. Collision detection scales almost linearly when you add more cores.

Of course good multithreaded scaling requires lots of planning. But you have to do this anyways if you intend to use your engine on more than one platform, and it you intend to keep the code maintainable. Dependencies are (almost) always a bad thing.

And dependencies do not always mean that the code cannot be parallelized well. For example in sorting algorithms every item basically has dependencies to each other. But for example radix sorting scales almost perfectly (linearly) when you increase the core count. It's true that some algorithms get an extra log multiplier to their run time if you split them to (infinite) amount of threads, but most algorithms scale well despite some data dependencies.

It's of course considerably more difficult to do things in a perfectly scalable way, but once you have done that already, your engine scales very well. I don't see any problems in 16 or 32 core/thread CPUs for engines that are designed to scale well.

 

[Arwin]

I fully agree with sebbbi. It's the one thing I've learnt from this gen for sure, and for programming in general, that you have to follow the data, and that your primary assumption should be that you'll be streaming everything past modifiers in tasks that can be split up and run in paralel.

I have also learnt that many this generation seem to have rather old-fashioned ideas about AI.

 

[Prophecy2k]

8x the raw power of the GPU is ~2TF. However, 8 the raw power with a GCN-class architecture would be much, much more than 8x the real performance. Efficiency has *at least* doubled, if not much more. I'd expect "8x performance" to mean something like 1TF chip.

The doc said 4-6x graphics performance, which I assumed would relate more to the GPU of the SOC. Hence 1.4-1.5 TF for the GPU. The 8x figure seemed to me to be referring to the entire chip (incl. CPU), hence should be ignored for the most part.

This way, the rumours of a 1-1.5TF GPU in durango seems alot more realistic. Again, like you said given the efficiencies in modern chip design, a 1-1.5TF chip in the 720 could provide a sizeable (8-10x) real world performance leap.

If indeed PS4's GPU would be 1.8TF then it really would be quite beefy for the same reasons.

 

[dumbo11]

Most of this fairly academic, a console with 4% lower performance is not going to lose the battle.

IMHO, I'd be looking for:
- proper consumer-level multi-tasking. I want to download a new game, and watch a movie. Or maybe I want to play a game whilst I download a movie. Or maybe popup the weather forecast whilst watching a movie etc.

- "fast start". I want to know the weather forecast/read mail. Ideally my first step should be this console. That means 'turns on immediately, gives answers instantly'. A side question is how the console helps me avoid hunting around for the TV remote and pressing the arcane set of buttons to get it to show HDMI2... (if I have to do that then it's not the fastest answer)

- hybrid input method.
Kinect is great for full-body activities, but rather poor elsewhere. Move is great for 'mouse-emulation', but poor at full body/keyboard. WiiU is an obvious idea that isn't necessarily a very good one.

Combine all 3:
- a kinect-style 3d camera for full-body/head tracking in low-light conditions.
- a move-style controller for accurate motions.
- a thumbpad on the move controller for "keyboard emulation" (left/right/up/down or buttons), ideally with tactile feedback.

Beyond that:
- disk space is pretty much vital, and I'd imagine the consoles will also ship with a form of cloud storage.
- VR glasses seem a better idea on paper than in practice.
- the 3d gaming performance needs to be 'competitive', although given the Wii's success this is not vital if you get the rest right.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Most of this fairly academic, a console with 4% lower performance is not going to lose the battle.

I don't disagree with anything you said particularly. However I'm wondering where this 4% figure you quoted is coming from?

Should I assume you weren't referencing the rumoured flops figures of both PS4 & Durango GPUs?

Just wondering is all.

 

[tunafish]

The doc said 4-6x graphics performance, which I assumed would relate more to the GPU of the SOC. Hence 1.4-1.5 TF for the GPU.
...
Again, like you said given the efficiencies in modern chip design, a 1-1.5TF chip in the 720 could provide a sizeable (8-10x) real world performance leap.

Performance != TF. What I'm scared of is that the 4x-6x graphics performance takes efficiency gains into account, and thus means a lot less flops.

Hopefully, this document was early and they got scared into adding more compute power.

If indeed PS4's GPU would be 1.8TF then it really would be quite beefy for the same reasons.

Yeah, assuming GCN, especially for more complex pixel shaders the scalar architecture will yield very high efficiencies, compared to the scalar+vector architecture in XB360. A lot of programmers will be surprised just how much more mileage they will get per flop.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Performance != TF. What I'm scared of is that the 4x-6x graphics performance takes efficiency gains into account, and thus means a lot less flops.

Hopefully, this document was early and they got scared into adding more compute power.



Yeah, assuming GCN, especially for more complex pixel shaders the scalar architecture will yield very high efficiencies, compared to the scalar+vector architecture in XB360. A lot of programmers will be surprised just how much more mileage they will get per flop.

Sure, well aware of that monseur, but at least it gives us at least some rough indication or basis for analysis (even if flawed).

It's all we have to go off so far.

 

[AlNom]

Performance != TF. What I'm scared of is that the 4x-6x graphics performance takes efficiency gains into account, and thus means a lot less flops.

The document isn't heavy into technical details.

 

[Gubbi]

The document isn't heavy into technical details.

It's either a fake or a very early draft, before any technical considerations were done. It has every thing *and* the kitchen sink. It looks more like a wish list than anything else. ARM cores for low power, x86 for high performance and PPC cores for backwards compatibility.

Cheers

 

[upnorthsox]

Hopefully, this document was early and they got scared into adding more compute power.

Maybe engineering intended it to scare them with what going cheap could mean.

In other words, you want a $299 console with all this other stuff thrown in to "win the living room", then here's the compute power that fits the budget. Scary huh.

 

[Rangers]

Hopefully, this document was early and they got scared into adding more compute power.

Well, the current rumor is 8GB RAM and a ~1-1.5TF, possibly Cape Verde GPU.

Certainly already sounds a lot better than this document, even if low end by PC standards.

My hope is MS has a big honkin custom GPU waiting in the wings to plug in when it's ready...since there seems to be a sentiment of "rest of system really good, GPU underwhelming", and also hints of more custom gpu than ps4/wiiu presumably, it would seem plausible.

Performance != TF. What I'm scared of is that the 4x-6x graphics performance takes efficiency gains into account, and thus means a lot less flops.

the whole 4-6x and shooting for 8x thing ign referenced, clearly comes from this document then.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/01/24/xbox-720-will-be-six-times-as-powerful-as-current-gen

The next Xbox will ship to retailers in late October or early November of next year with six times the processing power of the Xbox 360, sources close to the project have told IGN.

i distinctly seem to remember ign talking about "4-6X" and "shooting for 8x" though, I cant find it offhand.

Anyways the next Xbox seems like a quite odd design, parts of it I do not like all (focus on "green" eg low power, EDRAM, low performance targets etc) but it could be a big hit. You dont have to be powerful in the abstract vs say pc, just competitive with the other console guy, and I think throw in all those other ambitions it should do well provided it is competitive graphically.

one thing that bugs me is the guy wrote that presentation seems to be formerly from the zune dept. i ask who thought it was a good idea to put a guy from the failure called zune in a high position of xbox planning...