Were previous console jumps only 8-10x improvements?

[Blazkowicz]

Smaller transistors were being ran faster and faster and used more power. These days the trend has settled on trying to use more transistors to get the same workload to use less power in order to both back away from the peak power wall and allow more scaling down into smaller form factor devices.

That's what happened as well with the transition from Fermi to Kepler, in nvidia GPUs.

 

[MBDF]

For those who are interested in the CPU side of things and relative power, according to some calculations the Jaguar as in the PS4 and next Xbox could be comparable to a core 2 quad 9550, at least under some heavily threaded tests. Pretty good I say.

Thanks Sebbi:

Jaguar seems to be a really big improvement over Bobcat. It has slightly reduced power consumption... and still AMD has managed to double the core count, double the total L2 cache size, improve clocks by 10%, improve general x86 IPC by 15% and vector IPC by 100%.

If my math is correct, we should see around 2.53x (2.0*1.10*1.15) performance in generic (four thread) x86 software and around 5.06x (previous * 2.0) performance in vector processing (integer/float) compared to Bobcat. Not bad at all

How I arrived at the comparison: I compared the AMD E-350 (bobcat cores x2) against the core 2 quad 9550 here and applied the math above^ (E-350 score*2.53*2) or alternatively (E-350 score*5*2) for integer/float heavy multi-threaded tests.

Thanks also to pjbliverpool for the insight to compare the two chips.

The Jag is no slouch.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

Next gen:

-Xenos: 232 + 105
-Xenon: 165
-Cell: 234
-RSX: 300,4 ( as per the pic )
-Wii if it had been more powerful: 500
-AMD FX-8350: 1200

Total: 2736

Pitcairn: 2800

So, as for the GPU the jump in transistors is similar as it was last gen.
But, as for the CPU ( 8 cores Jaguar are 500-600 million transistors ) no, the jump is not the traditional next-gen jump.

 

[Arwin]

My estimation of Jaguar's transistor count is about 520-600 million. Cell's is 241 million.. however Cell runs twice as fast so it's getting more out of those transistors. In the end I guess it could be a wash, with Cell being better at some things and Jaguar better at others. Here's hoping they can get the speed of Jaguar up to 2GHz.

But what many fail to understand imho, is that the Jaguar is just replacing the Cell's PPE basically. The work of the SPEs is taken over by the CUs and fixed function hardware. If you look at it from that perspective, then the added efficiency of the Jaguar cores provide a very big leap over Cell's PPE.

(That's perhaps putting it a little bluntly, but not by much)