Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[sebbbi]

And? Look at NOVA3,Real racing2,Dark Meadow,Galaxy on fire 2 HD etc Do You think there is 40x drop, in quality in compare with consoles?

These games are getting very close to the original Xbox quality for sure, but many of them still miss some basic last gen graphics features such as normal mapping.

Real time lighting (with real time shadows) is something that's still completely missing from mobile games. Static light maps look pretty good and fake shadow blobs are often enough to replace true real time shadows. Transition to per pixel HDR lighting with real time calculated shadows for all light sources costs huge chunk of performance (5x+ more for GPU). Add in some cheap GI approximation (such as SSAO) and a stack of post processing effects and you'll match the current gen graphics quality.

One of the reasons why mobile games look comparable (or even better) to Xbox 1 and PS2 games is the improved content creation tools. Tools have surely improved a lot in the last years. Small screens (and tiny pixels) hide the imperfections of current runtime tech, and with the current rate of mobile GPU development, I am sure we will match current gen console quality in a few years.

 

[french toast]

When you guys talk about slow hard regarding the 720, I would like to remind you the hardware specs have changed since then. According to lherre, the current dev kits have 8 low speed cores, 8 Gb RAM and a 7000 series Radeon HD. That´s what we have now.

Regarding PS4, we know 10 months ago it had the APU+discrete GPU with 2 Gb of GDDR5, which might be 4 Gb now. And probably the new dev kits include the most powerful combination of APU+discrete GPU Sony can afford at the time the dev kit is sent to the developers.

Crikey ..that's more than 10x ps360 if true....which almost seems to be too good to be true imho.

 

[SKYSONY]

Crikey ..that's more than 10x ps360 if true....which almost seems to be too good to be true imho.

Which one?. Mind I´m far from being an expert in tech. Mind the 8 cores of the 720 seem to be 2.0 Ghz cores.

 

[french toast]

Which one?. Mind I´m far from being an expert in tech. Mind the 8 cores of the 720 seem to be 2.0 Ghz cores.

Yes but I bet they will be OoO cores with better memory management and more balanced...much more powerfull all in.

8gb of ram is ridiculous and I don't believe that for one second, that's 16 times xbox 360...sorry but no chance in hell.

The 7xxx class gpu will be a mahussive generational leap...seriously 10x at least if it's a tahiti pro....but again that would also be totally unrealistic imo.

I would expect something like a midrange card from that class of hardware.

It's the ram out of that which to me seems far to big....4gb I could believe..

 

[tunafish]

Mind the 8 cores of the 720 seem to be 2.0 Ghz cores.

By MS numbers, the typical IPC you can expect from a 360 thread in game loads is 0.2. This fits well with my experience with the system. Even if they went for the slow, cheap Brazos cores (which are the slowest x86 cores available as sythesisable IP), we can expect IPC to be somewhere near 1. (Possibly quite a bit more if it gets the same amount of compiler improving effort that Xenon did).

So those 3.2GHz dumb as rocks cores would be worth roughly 700MHz (or less) of more modern cores.

 

[RedVi]

And? Look at NOVA3,Real racing2,Dark Meadow,Galaxy on fire 2 HD etc Do You think there is 40x drop, in quality in compare with consoles?

They look on par in quite a few ways, and on a small screen it's easy to think that they look on par with PS360. Textures, polycount, lack of normal maps, dynamic lighting etc are all pretty big things really, and in that way they're more like last gen consoles. Sure, some things are quite a bit better, but optimising games with modern API's and tools is a lot easier than it was 10 years ago.

I digress though. Comparing to current gen - the extra power and bandwidth needed to add that which is missing from these mobile games isn't proportional to the visual benefit you see. Of course visual quality beyond things like resolution of the screen and assets is also entirely subjective.

 

[SKYSONY]

Well, I wouldn´t say the 8 Gb of RAM are unlikely. Mind the devkits have up to 12 Gb of RAM. I read on GAF (which is funny since a guy is quoting me there) that 3 Gb of the 8 available would be for the OS.

 

[Ruskie]

Iherre info is somewhat vague. 8 gigs where rumored for some time now, so was CPU. GPU on the other hand is what I'm interested about. Can he give exact model. Is it Cape Verde or Pitcairn? 7xxx could mean alot of things.

 

[MfA]

Wouldn't the NP nature of round robin style individual communications through all pairs of AI be the big show stopper, not how often they need to communicate?

Even if you define seeing other entities as communication that doesn't require pair wise communication, just asynchronous multicast.

For actual communication, again unless you are simulating instantaneously communicating hunter killer robots there are only so many actual messages they can exchange in a given time and you certainly don't need pair wise synchronous communication between all entities in a single time step ... all communication can be asynchronous and delayed by at least 1/60th of a second (or more) making it defacto irrelevant for parallelism.

If you approach AI as modelling human like intelligences everything is parallel. Parallelism is only lost when you try to simulate a swarm of robots trying to find optimum solutions to some problem using near instantaneous communicating and thinking patterns/speeds utterly unlike any real intelligences.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Well, I wouldn´t say the 8 Gb of RAM are unlikely. Mind the devkits have up to 12 Gb of RAM. I read on GAF (which is funny since a guy is quoting me there) that 3 Gb of the 8 available would be for the OS.

Multiple people on this forum have said that devkits usually come with double the ram so if devkits come with up to 12gb of ram that would mean 6gb or less.

Also, 3gb for the OS?? How's that ever going to happen? You can run windows 7 with 1gb ram and no gaming OS is going to be anywhere near as heavy as that.

 

[sebbbi]

By MS numbers, the typical IPC you can expect from a 360 thread in game loads is 0.2.
...
So those 3.2GHz dumb as rocks cores would be worth roughly 700MHz (or less) of more modern cores.

Xenon was a speed demon core just like Pentium 4 was. IPC sacrifice was made to clock them so high. AMD had 2.2 GHz cores at that time, and those were faster in many benchmarks than the 3.6 GHz Prescotts. Pentium 4 at least had OoO execution (Xenos was in-order), but even so, it fares very badly compared to modern cores at similar clock speeds. Here is the comparison of the highest end Prescott core (3.6 GHz, 600$ launch price, 2005) versus a recent 3.5 GHz Ivy Bridge:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/92?vs=551

Single threaded benchmarks (Cinebench R10 ST) show that a modern OoO core has over 3x higher single threaded IPC (instructions per clock) than an older OoO (speed demon) core. Of course a single Xenos core is even slower than similarly clocked P4 (it's an in-order core after all). But Xenos had 3 cores, while Prescott had just one (both had SMT/hyperthreading). So it was definitely a better choice for a gaming console (at that time).

 

[aaronspink]

8gb of ram is ridiculous and I don't believe that for one second, that's 16 times xbox 360...sorry but no chance in hell.

Not really, both 360 and ps3 came out with surprisingly low amounts of memory for the time.

8 GB of ram is ~$40 retail. Less in large volume.

 

[french toast]

Multiple people on this forum have said that devkits usually come with double the ram so if devkits come with up to 12gb of ram that would mean 6gb or less.

Also, 3gb for the OS?? How's that ever going to happen? You can run windows 7 with 1gb ram and no gaming OS is going to be anywhere near as heavy as that.

That sounds more reasonable..I guess all that extra ram is so they can test?

3gb for os is silly.

 

[Rangers]

Multiple people on this forum have said that devkits usually come with double the ram so if devkits come with up to 12gb of ram that would mean 6gb or less.

except 360 dev kits only had 512mb for years...so i guess theres no hard and fast rule

i keep hearing 8gb from the supposed insiders though.

its funny how people get ahold of supposed specs and just quickly twist it around to whatever they want lol.

 

[french toast]

Not really, both 360 and ps3 came out with surprisingly low amounts of memory for the time.

8 GB of ram is ~$40 retail. Less in large volume.

No they didn't. Jesus I'm not getting into that again, I'll just say think back to summer 2005 when xbox 360 was announced..
End of.

About the ram...I'm not that up to speed as many others however I do know you can't buy large densitys of advanced memory very cheaply..and you will need either a massive bus to hold that much ram (expensive) and get decent bandwidth if using ddr 3.

If you take a smaller cheaper bus you can use expensive ram like gddr5 or ddr 4 to get the bandwidth...but due to expense of said ram and likely density constraints you would struggle with any more than 4gb imo.

Going the small/moderate bus route (256bit?) And using some advanced memory like ddr4 would be expensive in the short term, but likely much cheaper in the long term when taking board shrinkage and future ram availability into account.

 

[tunafish]

Xenon was a speed demon core just like Pentium 4 was. IPC sacrifice was made to clock them so high. ... Of course a single Xenos core is even slower than similarly clocked P4 (it's an in-order core after all).

Yep. It's a very long time since I last did low-level stuff for P4, but if I had to pull a number out of a hat I'd say that a Prescott thread is capable of doing ~2x work per cycle that a Xenon thread can. Mostly because of being able to do some work during a L2 hit. Also, no horrible RAW stalls makes getting that performance easier. (Mind you, P4 has it's own performance horrors -- the trace cache is of really limited size, especially when you are running two threads. When your hot loop spills, it's a quick ride to slowtown. For bonus points, because the nature of the trace cache causes duplicate entries, the amount of code you can stuff in it is really unpredictable. Have fun optimizing.)

But Xenos had 3 cores, while Prescott had just one (both had SMT/hyperthreading). So it was definitely a better choice for a gaming console (at that time).

P4 likely wasn't even available. But IBM/freescale had several different projects with PPC cores of different capabilities available. Most of them would have been better choices.

I might still be a bit bitter. Back then, I was a quite green programmer with more than a little bit of fanboy enthusiasm. I had coded for the Apple G5 (PPC 970), and given that the release was 4 years later, I expected it to be some cut version of that that wouldn't have been much worse. Certainly no worse than the G4. Instead, what we got was the Xenon.

 

[bgassassin]

No they didn't. Jesus I'm not getting into that again, I'll just say think back to summer 2005 when xbox 360 was announced..
End of.

About the ram...I'm not that up to speed as many others however I do know you can't buy large densitys of advanced memory very cheaply..and you will need either a massive bus to hold that much ram (expensive) and get decent bandwidth if using ddr 3.

If you take a smaller cheaper bus you can use expensive ram like gddr5 or ddr 4 to get the bandwidth...but due to expense of said ram and likely density constraints you would struggle with any more than 4gb imo.

Going the small/moderate bus route (256bit?) And using some advanced memory like ddr4 would be expensive in the short term, but likely much cheaper in the long term when taking board shrinkage and future ram availability into account.

It's possible that they are going to use DDR4 with a decent amount of eDRAM for a framebuffer.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Was that DDR4 from the leaked 2010 doc?

Does DDR4 even have a roadmap?

Also, even if DDR4 is available would it's price not make going say 4GB GDDR5 a better option?

 

[Rangers]

maybe they'll hold durango off til early 14 like pachter thinks, heh

 

[tunafish]

Was that DDR4 from the leaked 2010 doc?

Does DDR4 even have a roadmap?

Yeah, presently it's samples this year, out in numbers next year, replaces DDR3 in the mass market in 2014/2015.

I think going DDR4 for a console to be released into holiday sales next year would be viable, if risky.

Also, even if DDR4 is available would it's price not make going say 4GB GDDR5 a better option?

DDR4 should be less expensive than any of the alternatives (ex. stacking) for the majority of the lifecycle of nextgen. It might be a tad pricy in the beginning...