What are Move Engines in Xbox One and PS4?

Modern blitters.

 

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.

 

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!


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What for?

 

True.

 

I thought 2 were standard on these APUs?

 

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

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

you win!

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

 

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.

 

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!