Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

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So as a console designer, if you had a choice between a GPU from Company A or a GPU from Company B, and the GPU from A was 15% better overall for your targets than the GPU from B but your rival had already secured a GPU from Company A, you'd choose the inferior GPU just to have a different GPU? How's that going to help your product?

If one GPU hardware vendor is clearly superior to another, then naturally it would make sense to go with that vendor. But AMD and NVIDIA are both equally good GPU hardware vendors IMO.
 
Arkam on GAF has just said that Nintendo have said that the Wii U CPU is an enhanced broadway:





This guy is known to have insider info. Massively disappointing if true.


I think I called this at one point and bgassasin or somebody shot me down.

Bet I'm right on the 1.6 ghz clock too :LOL:

My hunches are often accurate, not to brag. I'll throw another (OT) one out, $349 Wii U price.

All I need now is that RV730 to come in :p
 
If one GPU hardware vendor is clearly superior to another, then naturally it would make sense to go with that vendor. But AMD and NVIDIA are both equally good GPU hardware vendors IMO.
I don't dispute their abilities to provide capable GPUs, and I doubt many here would either. Just look back through this thread and see both AMD and nVidia GPUs being presented as candidates. However, choice of a console GPU isn't just a matter of a capable part. There are plenty of business considerations, possibly leading to a less capable part being chosen for matters of economy or availability or platform direction (maybe an APU in consoles for hardware synergy with other products?) or something. If AMD and nVidia are offering very similiarly spec'd options, it'd be quite possible for one to nab all three consoles with some smart business moves. Hence at this point we can't count on any particular IHV being in any particular box. So far rumours strongly place AMD at the heart of PS4, leaving only MS to go with the nVidia route, and given the success of Xenos in XB360 I expect MS would have a more natural preference for AMD that nVidia would have to successfully compete with. So I consider it quite possible that AMD will secure all three consoles.

Was there anything in nVidia's financials a while back that suggested a console collaboration? I'm thinking there was, but may be remembering that all wrong.
 
I think I called this at one point and bgassasin or somebody shot me down.

Bet I'm right on the 1.6 ghz clock too :LOL:

My hunches are often accurate, not to brag. I'll throw another (OT) one out, $349 Wii U price.

All I need now is that RV730 to come in :p

It would explain why Espresso was so adamant about it. That said Broadway as we know it wouldn't work and it's been dead too long to bother with "enhancing". So while I don't recall shooting it down in the past, I would in this post since you specifically mentioned me. A 476FP could easily be considered an "enhanced Broadway" and would achieve the clock speed you and others have mentioned in the past. I've even suggested it before as being at least a part of the CPU in a previous scenario.

And are you sure you want to boast about your hunches? I haven't seen to many accurate one in this thread. :p

And an RV730 still doesn't even work based on what was in the first dev kit.
 
Was there anything in nVidia's financials a while back that suggested a console collaboration? I'm thinking there was, but may be remembering that all wrong.

I have not read anything coming from NVIDIA relating to next gen consoles since that March 2011 interview. My assumption based on those comments is that NVIDIA is busily working on a next gen console, but who knows for sure other than those actually involved in the project.
 
I'm sure it is Broadway enhanced.

Works for BC.

Clock is 1.6ghz.

Will be $349 (tune in Sep 13 :p)

GPU will be RV730.

RAM will be 1GB usable, 1.5GB total.

You've thrown out "500-600 gflop" GPU constantly bg, I wouldn't be too proud of your track record yourself :p
 
I'm sure it is Broadway enhanced.

Works for BC.

Clock is 1.6ghz.

Will be $349 (tune in Sep 13 :p)

GPU will be RV730.

RAM will be 1GB usable, 1.5GB total.

You've thrown out "500-600 gflop" GPU constantly bg, I wouldn't be too proud of your track record yourself :p
I'm going to agree with this prediction. As we seen with 360, having dedicated audio processing unit instead of doing it on "archaic" CPU is good way for Nintendo to stick older and weaker CPU in the box. It shouldn't generate much heat, it will be under-clocked and ports from 360 will work. I'm going with 1 GB of usable memory too, and GPU of ~400 GFLOPS.
 
I'm sure it is Broadway enhanced.

Works for BC.

Clock is 1.6ghz.

Will be $349 (tune in Sep 13 :p)

GPU will be RV730.

RAM will be 1GB usable, 1.5GB total.

You've thrown out "500-600 gflop" GPU constantly bg, I wouldn't be too proud of your track record yourself :p

What track record? Plus I couldn't care less about being right or wrong because I want to be accurate. I'm not getting paid for this so it's no big deal to me. ;)

There's been nothing to say the GPU will be less than 500GFLOPs when the first dev kit was approximately 576GFLOPs. That said I don't know what mentioning that is supposed to mean as far as talking about me having a track record. Because there's been nothing to say otherwise right now so you can't tout that to discredit me saying that. I think the final ends up over 600GFLOPs.

And I'm not understanding the first sentence in response to what I said. Could you explain further?
 
You are spreading pure FUD here. Both AMD and NVIDIA are equally capable of providing an effective solution for next gen consoles with respect to "memory types and hierarchies". And good job backpedaling when I provided at least half a dozen differentiatiors between AMD and NVIDIA products and you just shoved it under a rug. Let's just agree to disagree because this is going nowhere.

It's not "pure FUD", before Kepler nVidia couldn't cook up high clocked GDDR5 memory controller, nVidia doesn't have eDRAM memory controllers in their history like AMD/ATI has, nVidia hasn't created and co-created several memory standards used by everyone like AMD/ATI has. IIRC they've also been generally slower adopting new, faster memory standards on top of that.

If one GPU hardware vendor is clearly superior to another, then naturally it would make sense to go with that vendor. But AMD and NVIDIA are both equally good GPU hardware vendors IMO.

Re-read the message you answered to with this, it said nothing about one vendor being better than another
 
You are spreading pure FUD here. Both AMD and NVIDIA are equally capable of providing an effective solution for next gen consoles with respect to "memory types and hierarchies". And good job backpedaling when I provided at least half a dozen differentiatiors between AMD and NVIDIA products and you just shoved it under a rug. Let's just agree to disagree because this is going nowhere.

First where did i back peddle ,maybe you need some better comprehension skills?

Here is my first point again
Because GPU's are the only point for differentiation? Right.
The rumors of memory types and hierarchies will have far more impact on performance then GPU manufacture which implicitly favors AMD over NV.

Second of all , AMD have way more experience in memory technologies and memory hierarchies. Where is NV's NUMA implementations? There complex low latency caching hierarchies? Where is there unified memory for CPU/GPU implementations? Where is there examples of using imposers? Just look how long it took them to get GDDR5 upto speed.

If there is one area where AMD have an advantage over NV its moving data.

But to put that all to one side, you still completely missed my point, there is nothing on the GPU side that NV can do that AMD can't and vise-versa. But what AMD can do is offer a complete package of CPU/GPU/North bridge/memory that has programming model benefits that no other party can provide.

Now consider that with my original point within the context of the current rumors going around. MS with 6+ gigs of slow ram and a pool of S/ED ram. Sony with 2-4gig of GDDR5 or possibly a wide I/O imposer based solution.
 
What track record? Plus I couldn't care less about being right or wrong because I want to be accurate. I'm not getting paid for this so it's no big deal to me.
Considering how wrong many analysts are but they still get paid anyway, I don't see being wrong as any deterrent to having a prediction in any scenario. ;)

Now consider that with my original point within the context of the current rumors going around. MS with 6+ gigs of slow ram and a pool of S/ED ram. Sony with 2-4gig of GDDR5 or possibly a wide I/O imposer based solution.
That's actually a good point. Sony have been heavily linked with AMd already, leaving MS as the most likely option for nVidia. And if MS are going with an S/EDRAM, that does play to AMD's experience.

Of course, is it really in nVidia's interest to chase the console market rather than spend their money in the mobile market? That's worth far more to them and they have a strong presence there. So it could be they didn't chase the console market very determinedly at all. IMO the main reason to get a strong presence in the console space is as it's the target for PC development, and you could net coding advantages with cross-platform titles. But with nVidia strong in the PC space and they know they'll get supported fully by the multiplatform engines, they don't really miss out.
 
Arkam on GAF has just said that Nintendo have said that the Wii U CPU is an enhanced broadway:

This guy is known to have insider info. Massively disappointing if true.


This info has been right under our nose the whole time but went mostly ignored by everyone.

Wii+U+CPU.jpg



Wii U CPU is 3 Wii CPU Cores clocked a bit higher "enhanced broadway"
 
Is this so bad? I mean he does say that it offers approx. the same power as Xenon and on top of that there is a separate DSP which frees some CPU cycles and a much more powerful GPU which can take over some of the physics processing. Sounds like it should be resonable especially considering how much more RAM is available. I mean this system will likely be cheaper upon release (than PS3 or 360) and much smaller with a much smaller power draw and will include a tablet... what are people expecting???
 
Is this so bad? I mean he does say that it offers approx. the same power as Xenon and on top of that there is a separate DSP which frees some CPU cycles and a much more powerful GPU which can take over some of the physics processing. Sounds like it should be resonable especially considering how much more RAM is available. I mean this system will likely be cheaper upon release (than PS3 or 360) and much smaller with a much smaller power draw and will include a tablet... what are people expecting???
Something that's able to beat a console CPU from 2005. Is that really too much to ask for in 2012?
 
I mean this system will likely be cheaper upon release (than PS3 or 360)

Really?

Do you see many devs coding specfic support for DSPs with their own limitations compared to current audio software solutions on every other platform outside Nintendo? It might not even be possible
 
Nintendo are the kings of copying. Wii had overclocked gamecube GPU and Gekko based CPU, and now we have a copy and paste overclocked Wii CPU.

Should we start a thread predicting the Wii U2 (Bono edition) hardware specs?
 
This info has been right under our nose the whole time but went mostly ignored by everyone.
How are they measuring power for a multicore Wii CPU to be comparable to 3.2 GHz tricore Xenon? In processing, with 3 fat vector units at 3.2 GHz, I can't see a tricore 1.6 GHz Gekko derivative being anything like a match in physics processing and the like.
 
If there is one area where AMD have an advantage over NV its moving data.

You need to stop living in the past and wake up to the reality that is today. In the past, AMD had advantages in areas such as GDDR5 performance, but NVIDIA has caught up and arguably even surpassed AMD with respect to GDDR5 performance (and even with a 27% memory bandwith deficit in total, GTX 680 still manages to perform similarly to HD 7970 in most games).

But to put that all to one side, you still completely missed my point, there is nothing on the GPU side that NV can do that AMD can't and vise-versa. But what AMD can do is offer a complete package of CPU/GPU/North bridge/memory that has programming model benefits that no other party can provide.

If your argument is that AMD is the only company in the world that has the skill and expertise to create a class leading high end console, then that is just naive, and you are promoting FUD. If there is a concern about a "complete package", then Project Denver will address those concerns next year (you do realize that project has been in the works for more than four years, right?). One should never blindly assume that other reputable companies do not have the resources, skill, and fortitude to create a groundbreaking new product. Xenos was designed from the ground up by AMD for use in Xbox 360. Why can't another good company design something else from the ground up for use in a next gen console? Clearly one of us will be eating crow between now and end of 2013, but don't be too surprised if NVIDIA does find a home in one of the next gen consoles from either Microsoft or Sony.
 
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I'm going to agree with this prediction. As we seen with 360, having dedicated audio processing unit instead of doing it on "archaic" CPU is good way for Nintendo to stick older and weaker CPU in the box. It shouldn't generate much heat, it will be under-clocked and ports from 360 will work. I'm going with 1 GB of usable memory too, and GPU of ~400 GFLOPS.
How have we seen that in the 360? It has no dedicated audio hardware beyond an XMA decoder.
 
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