Series X Refresh and Next Generation Xbox Hardware

[Globalisateur]

Being available doesn’t make it cheaper for them however. XSX had conservative clocks to increase yield. Silicon size may reduce sure, but it only is beneficial if you can actually get more usable chips per wafer out of it.

That's not what the massive heatsink suggests. At launch the mass of copper was about 50% more than PS5 heat sink (both with 7nm APU). PS5 heatsink was actually quite light but bigger (more volume), which is why it was very efficient (and didn't need vapor cooling).

Also the whole cooling setup was very complicated and expensive with that second mini board. The fact that the CPU clocks are a bit higher than PS5 suggest their yield could be actually worse than PS5.

 

[iroboto]

That's not what the massive heatsink suggests.

Heat sinks aren’t suggestive of yield. Xbox one has a massive heat sink it didn’t need.

Power output and frequency requirements are part of the yield calculation.

 

[iroboto]

Yeah, supply chain is hard. Just because you can get one part cheaper doesn't make the TCO go down. Amazon's second largest consumer of EC2 is their own supply chain sourcing department, which is continuously solving the travelling salesman problem for just about every SKU they carry. Where do they source it from, how is it transported, what tarrifs might apply, where is it warehoused, and who is buying it and where do they generally live? I happen to know the guy who runs the department, and despite how much money they spend on compute (tens of millions per month) they make it back a hundredfold or more every year just making sure supply chain is actually working at peak efficiency.

And it has to be said repeatedly, this is not Microsoft’s domain expertise. They are not churning out hardware products all the time for a variety of products where they can take advantage of a massive logistics pipelines and channels to exploit cost advantages.

 

[davis.anthony]

I think it should be fairly obvious that XSX GPU clock rates were really conservative given how high desktop RDNA2 GPU's clocked.

If they weren't that much slower in XSX for yield purposes, then what other reason?

 

[iroboto]

I think it should be fairly obvious that XSX GPU clock rates were really conservative given how high desktop RDNA2 GPU's clocked.

If they weren't that much slower in XSX for yield purposes, then what other reason?

Right, nailed it.

A comparable would be that 5pro is on 6nm.

52CUs should clearly be able to make it as high as 60CUs in clockspeed. All things equal the XSX would use less power here.

series consoles are very conservative.

 

[RDGoodla]

A comparable would be that 5pro is on 6nm.

Is Pro on 4nm?

 

[iroboto]

Is Pro on 4nm?

there are several sites reporting it’s very highly likely to be 6nm.
I don’t know any PC components on 4nm

 

[Charlietus]

there are several sites reporting it’s very highly likely to be 6nm.
I don’t know any PC components on 4nm

I don't know how it could be. It's too small and apparently, it's also silent.

And Nvidia is on 4nm.

 

[fehu]

Zen 5 too