Megadrive1988
Veteran
the Playstation3 is going to have roughly 534 million transistors between Cell and RSX.
that is about as many transistors expected for the CPU alone, back when PS3 was supposed to be getting an Emotion Engine 3.
the 218 Gflops, does this come from the 7 SPEs alone, or is it from the 7 SPEs plus the PPE with its VMX unit ?
in the recent gamespot article, it was said that Playstation3 might improve.
might they activate the 8th SPE, crank up the core clockspeed, use the 2nd revision of Cell which has 250M transistors, or all of the above?
(if anything)
I don't see Sony/SCEI going to an all-new type of architecture with PS4. as some of us have said before, the Cell technology will probably be drasticly scaled up for PS4, use more cores on a smaller process
(32nm, 22nm etc). I don't expect clock frequency to grow very drastically for PS4. maybe 7-10 GHz. (if even that) which would be the smallest increase generation over generation.
PS1 CPU: 33 MHz to PS2 CPU: 297 MHz = 9x increase
PS2 CPU: 297 MHz to PS3 CPU: 3200 MHz / 3.2 GHz = 10.7x increase
PS3 CPU: 3200 MHz / 3.2 GHz to PS4 CPU: 10 GHz (max) = 3.1x increase.
I realize that the PS4 CPU may not even reach anywhere near 10 GHz, but i'm just tossing that number out. so with the probable loss of the standard 9x to 10x increase in clockspeed, where is PS4 CPU going to gain performance, to even reach the same increase over PS3 CPU that PS3 CPU is going to be over PS2 CPU? more cores? yes. and more effiecient cores? hopefully. more agressive process technology compared to PS3 CPU's conservative 90nm for 2006? hopefully. larger die size compared to PS3 CPU? hopefully. more than one die? hopefully.
since I am not in the technology industry, I really dont have a clue as to everything that Im talking about. just going by the gen over gen advances that I've observed.
anyway back to what I was saying...
another 35x increase in flops performance over PS3 CPU would give us about 7.6 TFLOPs which sounds pretty good. that would meet and exceed the original goal of 1000 times PS2 performance, assuming Sony originally meant 1000x PS2's CPU flops performance.
then there's the PS4 GPU. lets look at Nvidia's roadmap circa 2004 at GeForce 6800s launch:
I *don't* think this is an actual roadmap of exactly where Nvidia will be, as it is just a scaling of the GeForce FX 5900 process into the year 2014, but I suppose we can use this as a rough basis.
by 2012 when PS4 should probably be due out, I think we'll have at least a 2 billion transistor Nvidia GPU with 30 to 50 billion vertice/sec performance, shader model 5.0+ operating at 1.5 GHz or faster.
ok I've just lost my train of thought. going to post this now and edit in anything else later 8)
that is about as many transistors expected for the CPU alone, back when PS3 was supposed to be getting an Emotion Engine 3.
the 218 Gflops, does this come from the 7 SPEs alone, or is it from the 7 SPEs plus the PPE with its VMX unit ?
in the recent gamespot article, it was said that Playstation3 might improve.
might they activate the 8th SPE, crank up the core clockspeed, use the 2nd revision of Cell which has 250M transistors, or all of the above?
(if anything)
I don't see Sony/SCEI going to an all-new type of architecture with PS4. as some of us have said before, the Cell technology will probably be drasticly scaled up for PS4, use more cores on a smaller process
(32nm, 22nm etc). I don't expect clock frequency to grow very drastically for PS4. maybe 7-10 GHz. (if even that) which would be the smallest increase generation over generation.
PS1 CPU: 33 MHz to PS2 CPU: 297 MHz = 9x increase
PS2 CPU: 297 MHz to PS3 CPU: 3200 MHz / 3.2 GHz = 10.7x increase
PS3 CPU: 3200 MHz / 3.2 GHz to PS4 CPU: 10 GHz (max) = 3.1x increase.
I realize that the PS4 CPU may not even reach anywhere near 10 GHz, but i'm just tossing that number out. so with the probable loss of the standard 9x to 10x increase in clockspeed, where is PS4 CPU going to gain performance, to even reach the same increase over PS3 CPU that PS3 CPU is going to be over PS2 CPU? more cores? yes. and more effiecient cores? hopefully. more agressive process technology compared to PS3 CPU's conservative 90nm for 2006? hopefully. larger die size compared to PS3 CPU? hopefully. more than one die? hopefully.
since I am not in the technology industry, I really dont have a clue as to everything that Im talking about. just going by the gen over gen advances that I've observed.
anyway back to what I was saying...
another 35x increase in flops performance over PS3 CPU would give us about 7.6 TFLOPs which sounds pretty good. that would meet and exceed the original goal of 1000 times PS2 performance, assuming Sony originally meant 1000x PS2's CPU flops performance.
then there's the PS4 GPU. lets look at Nvidia's roadmap circa 2004 at GeForce 6800s launch:
I *don't* think this is an actual roadmap of exactly where Nvidia will be, as it is just a scaling of the GeForce FX 5900 process into the year 2014, but I suppose we can use this as a rough basis.
by 2012 when PS4 should probably be due out, I think we'll have at least a 2 billion transistor Nvidia GPU with 30 to 50 billion vertice/sec performance, shader model 5.0+ operating at 1.5 GHz or faster.
ok I've just lost my train of thought. going to post this now and edit in anything else later 8)
