Xbox One (Durango) Technical hardware investigation
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trainplane
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They should be able to do that or create a cross compatible upgrade in 1-2 years with these specs since they are essentially standard PC parts which will get upgraded by AMD anyway--the iPad model. The trick is to ensure games are cross compatible. The eDRAM could prove problematic if they don't use it on their next edition. By 2015 we will hopefully see Wide I/O and stacking in manufacturing solutions.
The funny thing about these relatively low gpu specs is that I don't think they are really saving much either. The difference for manufacturing between this and PS3's GPU is probably in the tens of dollars and it will continue to shrink. Seems like a penny wise pound foolish move.
Ah well, the only exclusive games I liked from the Xbox 360 were Forza and Gears for horde mode but other TPS has a horde mode these days. Oh and Lost Odyssey but MS probably won't make JRPGs anymore. The Xbox Live games generally don't need higher end GPU. I much prefer the 360 controller but PC versions largely use this now.
7770 appears to have gimped memory bandwidth itself, though, since it has 33% less FLOPS, but only 50% of the bandwidth of the 7850. Also consider that Durango's GPU will have read/write access to both pools of memory. It's not strictly limited to 102GB/s or 32MB.
I'm certainly not arguing that there's any hidden power in Durango's hardware that is going to fully make up for the spec difference between it and Orbis. I like what Sony have done with Orbis. Once you get past the initial level of compromise of them not going absolutely crazy on the specs, I think they have delivered a well-balanced design that should be very easy for developers to get great performacnce from. I'm just trying to paint as complete a picture as possible of Durango, because I'm still curious about the multiple different sources indicating that developers regard the two to be "roughly equivalent" or that Orbis is "slightly more powerful" when what we know of the specs indicates nothing of the sort.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
It's quite likely that even with dev kits they would have been briefed by either company as to what the final specifications of the console would be. Things like that allow for minor changes in design to the final specs, like what Epic did with the X360. Or, if rumors are to be believed, like what Sony did with upping memory to 4 GB from 2 GB. But you can't change things too drastically or you potentially screw over the developers you are relying on for launch titles.
You wouldn't want a developer over targeting and going along developing something that would be unplayable and then have to redo development when they found out the final specs were drastically different.
Regards,
SB
Hecatoncheires
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If we were talking about two homogeneouse processors for CPU and GPU then I would agree with you. Yet I'm expecting a little more due to the HSA design. Orbis and Durango will have a very huge architectural advantage over classical PC designs, the communication between the single elements of the APU will be much faster. A HSA processor working to capacity is certainly another big unknow of the equation.
Love_In_Rio
Veteran
Nothing in Durango or Orbis still points to HSA, only Fusion 1.0 at the moment...
Jaguar+GCN alone implies additional HSA features like unified memory.
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Love_In_Rio
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From http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/2
By having access to the CPU's virtual address space now the data goes from disk, to memory, then directly to the GPU's memory—you skip that intermediate mem to mem copy. Eventually we'll get to the point where there's truly one unified address space, but steps like these are what will get us there.
Hecatoncheires
Newcomer
HSA and Fusion is the same thing: AMD renamed the Fusion System Architecture (FSA) to Heterogeneous System Architeture (HSA). Sony officially joined the HSA Foundation a couple of days ago.
The first HSA platform was 40nm Llano (both mobile and desktop). The second gen HSA was the 32nm Trinity platform (again both mobile and desktop). Third gen HSA is 28nm Kaveri for desktop (Steamroller + GCN) and Kabini for mobile (Jaguar + GCN). Orbis is 28nm Jaguar + 28nm GCN which points directly to third gen HSA, introducing unified adress space for CPU and GPU, pageable memory for GPU with CPU pointers and fully coherent memory between CPU and GPU. These are the features that you need to get rid of the aforementioned copy overhead. The 28nm Temash SoC (edit: Temash = ultra low power) managed to render the current gen game Dirt: Showdown in 1920x1080 fluently with a thermal design power of only 5W. I guess that speaks for itself.
To cut a long story short, everything points to HSA, at least for Orbis.
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No. TMU needs to be very close to CU to serve memory fetches. Basically, the TMUs are the load units of the CUs. They cannot be separated from them.
The GPU is not outdated. The architecture is the best architecture available on the market today. The design philosphy behind Durango it's not being "cheap": it's about being low-power. From a technological point of view, Durango will be advanced. It's a SoC with 8 customized Jaguar-core (a next-gen architecture which is not even on the market yet), what it could be a powerful audio processor, a mid-range current generation GPU and some other fixed function part we don't yet know.
Even if Durango is considerably less powerful than what most of us was expecting, I don't think they invested little in it's development.
These are the kind of specs i would expect for a console released early 2012 ... for a machine out in late 2013 / early 2014 , it's quite shocking .
Posting comparison between Durango and Orbis in the wrong thread is courting a ban hammer.
Opps thought I was in the comparison thread.
Lol almost every single one of your posts is some kind of variation on this one. You should start a HSA fan club!
For the record though, while HSA - if these consoles truly are fully HSA - will allow gameplay effecting GPGPU algorithms to be incorporated into games, it's not going to make much difference to the actual graphics of the game which is what most people seem to be focussed on when comparing the relative power of the GPU's. So it's not really correct to say the GPU in PS4 will be more powerful than the equivalent GPU in a PC because of HSA. The proper comparison would be between the CPU's. i.e. thanks to the fusion like design, the Jaguar based CPU's in some respects have performance far beyond a PC CPU sporting ~100 GLFOPS. Assuming that PC CPU doesn't also have access to HSA features.
You say that as if being able to play that game somehow has something to do with Temash being HSA ready. It has nothing to do with that. Dirt runs on that APU because it has an incredibly powerful (by tablet standards) GCN based GPU along with a decent x86 CPU. Dirt likely makes no use of HSA whatsoever.
I'm not saying you're wrong about this, but do you have a link supporting it? Its just that all the recent AMD slides I've seen single out the Kaveri generation as being HSA while ignoring Trinity and earlier (Fusion based APU's).
xJumPeRJumPzZ
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superDaE said:
I'm not that Cryengine guy.
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