What are Move Engines in Xbox One and PS4?

[Liandry]

Maybe wrong thread but I have a quesion. What exaltly is Move Engines, how hey work? I just can't find some info what tells something understandable about them.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Maybe wrong thread but I have a quesion. What exaltly is Move Engines, how hey work? I just can't find some info what tells something understandable about them.

Modern blitters.

 

[Liandry]

Modern blitters.

But they really do something useful?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

They move data from one RAM pool to another, saving the CPU/GPU from having to waste cycles on that work. One of them has some compression.decompression ability. Move Engines are a fancy name for a trivial part.

 

[Liandry]

Move Engines are a fancy name for a trivial part.

So in other systems there is some similar blocks? In PS4 also?

 

[Scott_Arm]

So in other systems there is some similar blocks? In PS4 also?

Yep

 

[iroboto]

Yep

Yes and No. Pretty sure they don't exist in PS4. But exist in PC GPUS.

Ps4 has a unified pool, they don't need DMA engines.

Nothing to move!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[milk]

What for?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yes and No. Pretty sure they don't exist in PS4. But exist in PC GPUS.

Ps4 has a unified pool, they don't need DMA engines.

Nothing to move!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

True.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Yes and No. Pretty sure they don't exist in PS4.

I thought 2 were standard on these APUs?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yes and No. Pretty sure they don't exist in PS4. But exist in PC GPUS.

Ps4 has a unified pool, they don't need DMA engines.

Nothing to move!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I believe the DMA engines can also facilitate movement to/from storage medium (in this case the HDD). Although it could be handled by the CPU DMAs. It's rather murky on PS4/XBO with regards to movement to/from storage medium as both the CPU and GPU share main memory and as they are both SOCs.

Regards,
SB

 

[iroboto]

hmm.. I guess we should start looking at some SoC diagrams to confirm lol

 

[Liandry]

But what exactly are benefits of Move Engines? They give more RAM bandwidth efficiency or what?

 

[3dilettante]

They can move data between the ESRAM and DRAM without wasting the GPU's more valuable time. They also have some ancillary functionality for compression/decompression, tiling, and bulk initialization of memory that can be useful since they don't waste the GPU's valuable time or require CUs to burn more power than the dedicated engines would.
In overall throughput, the engines are actually bottlenecked due to the lower-bandwidth bus they hang off of.

 

[function]

Generally, it would probably be better to use data from the memory pool in which it resides if you can. DMAing data between pools will use up both read and write BW in the source and destination memory pools.

If you can read from one location, process, then write to another you save any unnecessary reads or writes.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

 

[iroboto]

View attachment 1325

you win!

This was actually the diagram I was thinking of. It's sitting there on the right.

 

[babcat]

Absolutely. The XBox One had some secret sauce with the extra engines. I think they will try to have secret sauce in the Scorpio as well.

 

[iroboto]

Absolutely. The XBox One had some secret sauce with the extra engines. I think they will try to have secret sauce in the Scorpio as well.

uhh, some misinformation there bud.
no extra engines dude =(

only a customized command processor... for a feature that no one has ever used yet.

 

[babcat]

So I guess the authors of the following website are lying?

http://www.redgamingtech.com/xbox-o...s-memory-bandwidth-performance-tech-tribunal/

There were no "move engines" in the XBox One?

Let me look up some more liars on the internet.

I found out that Eurogamer is lying too on their website. They report there were FOUR "move engines" in the XBox One.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-the-xbox-one-architects

Look at these blatant lies from Microsoft!

Microsoft's recent Hot Chips 25 presentation on the Xbox One processor suggested that the chip had 15 processors on-board. We were curious as to how that broke down.

"On the SoC, there are many parallel engines - some of those are more like CPU cores or DSP cores. How we count to fifteen: [we have] eight inside the audio block, four move engines, one video encode, one video decode and one video compositor/resizer," says Nick Baker.