Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[anexanhume]

Possible, but it's unlikely that the 1+ TF GPU rumor is that, since it's been said by so many independent sources, that it's unlikely to be a controlled leak to determine who is the leaker.

We also have independent reports of a 450 mm^2 APU with 170W-200W total console TDP. One of those sources being an industry journalist who claims to be talking to devs. I trust that more than Joe Blow claiming to talk to devs.

 

[(((interference)))]

Lol ok, (this is despite bgassassin being verified by lherre) but what about the ex-MS engineer who has indicated all reports of a large GPU are bs? And that we know that the pastebin rumour back in Dec 2011 has the same number? Or the fact lherre has said the 720 has the weaker GPU of the pair?

Who said the die was 450 mm^2?

 

[N2O]

Well the latest reply just show you choose rumors you like to see.

Like the pastebin,if you really bring this (seems) old rumor back,you should know that pastebin guy also implying PS4 just some " piece of sxxt eMachines unit from Walmart's $200 special (including monitor)." right?

And the secret sauce is...

Wait,wasn't that's #1 AMD China guy's info?
And that's rumor for Durango,not Orbis


But it's funny to see B3D vs TGFC which one will right at the end,because while people in here are expecting Durango only have 1.2tf GPU/weaker GPU etc,and saying that AMD china guy's info is wrong(at least proelite said that),people in TGFC also expecting Durango will have HD8850+ level GPU,and whatever GPU or overall performance,it will better than Orbis,oh and they starting to hate neogaf,i need to check it out why.

 

[DoctorFouad]

It just means Sony has 50% more CUs and 50% more flops. That tells us really really little about performance.

EDIT: Your predictions for the systems tell me everything I need to know about you. No offense.

as I said, my predictions were an uneducated fast first attempt ones 1 years earlier, what do you expect ? but despite that I do believe I have many things right after all (4 Gb of GDDR5 at around 160 Gb/s for ps4, for example).

Yeah, that list man....a 4tflop GPU for PS4 for 399 yet Durango has 499 and 599 respectively...

Okay, so 1.2 tflop gpu with "special sauce". I guess this confirms the sauce rumors swirling around provided BG is correct?

both consoles would sold at 499$, where do you see PS3 at 399 ? and a 4 Tflops GPU is feasible if ps4 is released in 2014; but commercially sony cant do a suicide step like that.

Hmmmm....
Would you like to define "most developers", "most powerful" and "efficient" in that statement and how they ended up transferring into actual running games?

most developers = multiplatform developers.

The CELL processor is more powerful than xbox360 processor, in terms of gflops but also in terms of what you can achieve (more physics calculations, post processing effects to help the GPU...etc)

efficient means : more performance per transistor, or more performance per $.

 

[Rangers]

Not saying I don't believe these rumors, but I really have to wonder if there is some misinformation on here on purpose.

You know what I am saying? Like both companies are putting out false information against each other on purpose and they can do this because they can say that they are just rumors.

They know we will lap this up like a cat that laps up milk and they know we will run with it while we get played like pawns.

Makes me really wonder about this stuff.

I wonder a bit too, BUT...

In the grand scheme of things are the 20 guys on B3D or 100 guys on GAF who discuss this stuff relevant in the least? I doubt it. What would be so great about duping us? Joe Six Pack will never hear about any of this.

There's also the simple fact of, dev kits. You cant fake them and they have to exist and go to third parties. Hence you cant hide the hardware forever and there should be real leaks.

Theres also the 360 history. If you think real leaks dont happen, consider an incredibly detailed and accurate hardware schematic for 360 leaked nearly two years before it.

It definitely mesh perfectly with the wild theory that he's working for a marketing firm, his job is to build up hype, he's waiting for the green light from the execs, and will say exactly what he's supposed to "leak". And that we won't get much of the details we want, including the "special sauce". But hey, maybe I'm wrong and he's really a big spy and is risking his professional life for the betterment of mankind.

If he knows something, why not just tweet the f**** specs? What's the deal with a google hangout, and building up hype for 10 hours straight?

He's not working for a marketing form, he's just a troll. He just enjoys yanking people around I guess. And even if he knows and understands Durango specs exactly, he's not just going to give them out. Both probably for safety reasons, and that it just wouldn't be any fun. He has 900 twitter followers and would probably have 5 if not for his durango teasing. That's probably worth something, people like followers on twitter. If DaE's organizing some sort of google hangout to "tell all", my guess knowing him is it's just another tease.

All that said, some things he says seem to indicate he really does have a kit, so I find little tidbits of info from him to be interesting (examples, when he said Durango dev kits had switched to 1080P mandated, when he said beta kits were coming out (which was later corroborated by another source).

 

[Rangers]

Then i must have misinterpreted you. But if you think that a 1.2tflop GPU is in the kits, then what are your thoughts on the retail unit? Or rather, what does that impact on the retail unit i guess.

I'm curious at to your thought process on this one

I think it will be the same. AFAIK the beta kits are final hardware. I guess they may not be final final, and this is all just guesswork, but I'm not really expecting much if any deviation to retail. I suppose clocks are maybe something that could still be tweaked?

 

[cal_guy]

The CELL processor is more powerful than xbox360 processor, in terms of gflops but also in terms of what you can achieve (more physics calculations, post processing effects to help the GPU...etc)

It's also much slower in multi-threaded scalar integer and that's not a minor problem given how weak the Xbox 360 CPU/PS3 PPE are.

 

[kots]

My question to them is, how can you be disappointed with 16 times the ram, atleast 3 times the bandwidth, the GPU alone without any propping up with the secret sauce is more than 5x on paper(which is likely more in real world performance because of the efficiency of modern ALU's in comparison to 360's ALU's), and you get 8 jaguar cores which i assume is a sizable jump from 360's CPU as well.

Eh .. it's shockingly low if true - if after 8 years that's the best they can do ....
I suppose the Ram is ok , but the GPU is laughable , let's be honest . And even God himself could not make it any better that what it is ... even with "secret sauce" (lol).
Also 8 netbook/cell phone cores isn't something to brag about .

 

[Docwiz]

I found some specs that sound like a fanboy dream about durango and I wish it were true so much.

I won't post it because I know it's not real but wow is this thing custom. It's really, really, really custom and I wish it was true.

None of these are the specs that you see on this forum.

 

[DoctorFouad]

This might be a bit OT but I often wonder just how much intel do MS and Sony know about each other regarding their nextgen consoles? If they're both going with AMD this time chances are some shadowy AMD employees would get heavily money-hatted from either companies for leaking precious data. Could a double agent like such have existed?

sony and microsoft dont even need such agent, they simply could obtain the same info from multiplatform developers. but if you mean 'before even development kits went into production", than maybe, these sorts of things are human after all...

 

[RedVi]

That's stupid, and going into conspiracy territory, not useful in this thread.

Anyway i'd also be intrested in knowing where intel CPU's come from

AFAIK there was a bit of confusion when the images of the supermicro server case were posted, someone stumbled upon the server offered and it's default setup had twin xeons. Of course, they didn't research any deeper as the same case can also be specced out with Opterons. They could have used a low clocked 8 core magnycours Opteron to simulate an 8 core jaguar fairly effectively. If if the jaguar featured in durango does end up being fairly modified, maybe even a bulldozer based opteron.

 

[ebola]

Curious about the speculation of some sort of 'blitter' (or rather a "dma engine with swizzles etc") & "special-sauce"

would this have any use in the modern world?
I thought back to the VIF in the PS2 and wondered if there might have a use for something that permutes data to&from SIMD friendly formats (remember the 360s ability to lock l2 cache for 'xps'?..imagine dmaing to a locked cache) but that seems very far off the 'easy to program' general purpose cpu/gu based design that these machines clearly will be.. and GPU's already seem to be adept at adressing memory.

Would there be any use for an assist that could do more when resolving from EDRAM (eg changing texture layouts to optimize between formats for render targets & textures)

could a 'blitter' do decompression of blocks of data in a way GPU's cant (e.g. sources that aren't randomly acessible homogeneous arrays, greater levels of indexing in vertex data..) - but again, that seems far off the friendly programming model and more toward an oldschool ps2/ps3 philosophy .(compressed VBOs ?? blitter decompresses them into a specsialized vbo-cache?)

or would there be scope for blitter assists with tiling (cramming framebuffer hungry effects into smaller EDRAM) - or moving values around between defered rendering g-buffers and so on

could a "blitter" be a cut down GPU aimed purely at postprocessing (especially postprocess Anti-Aliasing to cut down on bandwidth heavy scenarios)

 

[(((interference)))]

Curious about the speculation of some sort of 'blitter' (or rather a "dma engine with swizzles etc") & "special-sauce"

You want this thread: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=62820

 

[Rangers]

It was said that the custom elements help specifically with graphical rendering tasks.

And you don't have to tell me what imaginary number not to expect in the unit, the bandwidth of the ram is what is my highest priority is.

Personally, a 1.2 tflop unit with certain boosters attached seems better to me in comparison to something that is completely bandwidth starved, i am not looking for a 3tflop gpu, or even a 2 tflop gpu at this point.

I was very worried too, expecting a 128 bus, but...

I was asking my sources about aegis (I think?) rumour that Durango could access 1GB/sec.
And asked him whether that was at 30 or 60 fps and he said "60".

this means 256 bus imo. if it proves true i'm thrilled with that.

 

[Rangers]

Yeah, still a huge disparity with PS4 and GDDR5, but i guess devs will code to the lowest common denominator at that point for ease of multiplatform development between the two systems, so it won't be too bad

What advantages does ESRAM give? Any over EDRAM?

The idea is the ESRAM will give some bandwidth to help certain common operations. So you cant directly compare main memory bandwidth. Just as 360's EDRAM did this gen, when it had about half the overall system bandwidth as PS3 but fared fine.

It's really like (rumored specs) 192GB/s vs 60 GB/s+ESRAM (difficult to quantify, but a big help). But of course this isn't the versus thread.

And ESRAM vs EDRAM I dont know. There's been some discussion in this thread about it.

 

[McHuj]

Based on the currently strongest rumours (1.3 vs. 1.9 TFlops) can we estimate the power usage and size of the box. Of course not with real numbers but in the range of smaller/same/bigger?

I think both are shaping up to be slightly lower than the 360/ps3 when it shipped. IMO, if both are APU's with the speculated GPUs, I think both will be around 100w for the chip and 150-175w for the total box.

 

[Rangers]

If we're talking about a 256-bit memory bus then it wouldn't be so odd to expect an SoC that's at least 350 mm², IMHO. I mean, Microsoft is pretty much expected to shrink the chip to 20 nm around 1.5 years after it's release or so, and you can't really make it too small or your 256-bit bus won't fit anymore. If we're talking about 350 mm², then that means we have around 150 mm² space left for eDRAM and special sauce to fill up, provided it has a 1.2 TF GPU.


Proelite isn't a source AFAIK. Oh, and N2O hasn't been claiming that it will have a 3+ TF GPU, just that he doubts the 1.2 TF rumor. For all we know it will have a 2.1 TF GPU.

yeah, i'm still a bit skeptical.

i just found this on google, interesting factoid

Smallest 256-bit GPUs in history are RV670 (192mm2) & G71 (196mm2).

i wonder if 256 ddr3 buses are any different (smaller) than gddr5? any tech wizards know?

According to alstrong's list: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=62651 360's are currently at 213mm^2 of total silicon. Still above the 256 GDDR5 bus floor.

So I suppose it's plausible, if MS never plans to shrink below about ~200mm^2. And if in year 7-8 360 is still >200mm, that may be enough.

And the situation would just be better if DDR3 buses are smaller than GDDR5 ones.

 

[N2O]

Ok, let's count how many sources have either outright confirmed or have made statements that are consistent with a 1.2TF GPU:

2010 leaked roadmap-old

Nov 11 Pastebin
bgassassin
bkilian
lherre
You believe what you like and ignore others

Rangers-not sources
Proelite (back in June 12)-not sources

Now, please tell me how many sources have done the same with your 3+ TF GPU?

Are you implying i'm that russian guy?sorry,i'm not,and i never said it will have 3+ tf GPU.

No, it could be plausible that the poster got his info from two different sources (the Durango one could be accurate, the PS4 one not)

Or, the PS4 specs, could have been accurate at the time. We don't know how the early PS4 looked like - maybe before the devkits came out they had only 2GB RAM and some weakass GPU.

Yeah,again.

 

[(((interference)))]

Rangers has sources, bkilian confirmed his 3 custom blocks.

I don't know about Proelite, he just had the right number, if he'd made it up it'd likely be higher, especially given his recent claims (but perhaps he was just basing it on other rumours).

Then there was also that bluedevilstudent guy on semiaccurate who was saying Rangers was right and talked about the pseudo GPU:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1693204&postcount=18196

Either way, they're at least 6 sources of info, consistent with 1.2 TF or thereabouts.
It is by far the most corroborated FLOPS number for Durango, haven't seen any other number come close.

But maybe you'll tell us what you think is a likely TF number and then see what you can find corroborating that.

 

[lefizz]

So secret sauce is 2x soc?