Xbox Scorpio Hardware Prediction Thread [April 2017 Revision]

[VitaminB6]

I thought devs were in favour of unified memory. Unless you meant 8 GB gaming RAM and 4 GBs OS RAM?

I was thinking 10 GB gaming 2GB OS. 2 GB of DDR4 dedicated to the CPU to avoid contention, 8 GB GDDR5 for the GPU, and 2 GB DDR4 dedicated to the OS. The two pools will be unified virtually so to the developer it will look as though it is one pool of ram. I have fairly limited knowledge so I could be way off here Most of my knowledge comes from reading this forum for the last three years. I always enjoy your posts Shifty.

 

[Magnum_Force]

I miss remembered that the release bandwidth figure was actually 320GB/s, so that would make a 384bit bus an odd choice. However a 256 bit bus would need 10 ghz effective ram speed, which would most likely mean gddr5x, which and doesn't use currently, so hmmm.

Maybe it is only 8GB and they were waiting for Vegas "high Bandwidth Cache" tech so they could use a onboard pool of nand to increase effective memory that way.

AMD has the Radeon Pro SSG in the works which uses SSD's, but those are state of the art SSD's with 2.5GB/s bandwidth each.

I read somewhere that the PS4 Pro has 1GB of slower RAM for system tasks, so I suppose Microsoft could do the same, maybe make it a larger pool of 8GB or so so the HBC system Might benefit, but then that adds a pretty hefty cost.

 

[MrFox]

HBC is more for PC-style memory architecture, and for situations where there isn't nearly enough VRAM. This cannot really happen on a console with unified memory.

Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

 

[Jay]

it's interesting the different interpretations of lessons learned from esram.
mine is it shows that even with 32mb of fast memory that it was able to perform pretty comparitively at 900 & 1080p, the issues devs had was with fat gbuffers and render targets etc. So the 32mb size was the issue, not the concept.

so how much memory would be required for 4k fat buffers etc, make the address space map across both pools, then your good to go.

doing it the other way around doesn't make sense to me, large fast expensive memory with a small slower one.

ps4 has an arm processer that has additional ddr3, not the apu.
ps4 still suffers contention as os, cpu, gpu all share the same gddr5

 

[Jay]

HBC is more for PC-style memory architecture, and for situations where there isn't nearly enough VRAM. This cannot really happen on a console with unified memory.

Middle Generation Console Upgrade Discussion [Scorpio, 4Pro]

it can if you make your big memory pool ddr4.
also I'm not sure i would word it as "isn't nearly enough VRAM" although i know what you meant, it's more efficient use of memory from amd point of view

 

[eastmen]

why isn't navi an option ?

 

[MrFox]

why isn't navi an option ?

Reading between the lines...

Ran out of poll options.

No prize for anyone getting it right in the poll as its too generic. If the poll is right, it'll prove 'B3D Knows' and the rest of the internet should sit up and pay attention instead of reading MrX type crap everywhere else.

Closest match in the details might win notoriety.

 

[eastmen]

thanks didn't see that .

 

[mpg1]

Yeah I'm really curious to know about the memory. 12GB GDDR5 + additional slow memory pool would be impressive.

 

[mpg1]

Also we are making all these predictions when...the extent of info related to the CPU on Thursday could be something like "Custom 8 Core AMD CPU @ x.xGHz"

We may not get any mention of architecture

 

[MrFox]

I think we will if it's based on zen, otherwise we'll still probably learn it from the traditional eurogamer leak. The timing for mentioning zen would be more potent after there are PC benchmarks available (like right now?). They would be stupid not to say it.

 

[iroboto]

Also we are making all these predictions when...the extent of info related to the CPU on Thursday could be something like "Custom 8 Core AMD CPU @ x.xGHz"

We may not get any mention of architecture

Predictions in now before the information comes and becomes too easy to figure it out

It's like wheel of fortune. The longer you wait to guess the sentence, the more letters there are to help you out. Lol.

 

[BRiT]

Predictions in now before the information comes and becomes too easy to figure it out

It's like wheel of fortune. The longer you wait to guess the sentence, the more letters there are to help you out. Lol.

Especially on reruns or DVR.

 

[Rangers]

Also we are making all these predictions when...the extent of info related to the CPU on Thursday could be something like "Custom 8 Core AMD CPU @ x.xGHz"

We may not get any mention of architecture

Which will mean it's Jaguar. (Or Puma or whatever).

And yes as a comment on Neogaf. they will almost certainly NEVER mention that it's Jaguar if it is. They will just say "8 core custom CPU" and the like.

 

[iroboto]

Which will mean it's Jaguar. (Or Puma or whatever).

And yes as a comment on Neogaf. they will almost certainly NEVER mention that it's Jaguar if it is. They will just say "8 core custom CPU" and the like.

That's not true. MS is not responsible for fan hype over the architecture of their hardware.

People hoped for one thing but got another. There are tradeoffs in play here. No reason to hide the truth from your customer, especially when not being straight forward is what their customers are unsatisfied with.

You should be more shocked that with all the insider knowledge apparently
Out there that both CPU and GPU architecture has yet to leak. Think about that, the most sought after information is still guarded. Some very serious actions have taken place to ensure this.

The advantages are of course obvious when you take a look at our poll and you look at historical information. Sony ran with 2 SKUs for 4Pro and decided on one over the other released. This is of course rumoured information.

What if they have multiple SKUs of Scorpio about and are still waiting to decide on which one to mass manufacture? They still have a lot of time to decide this. The idea of a final SDK unlocking significantly more power is possible (but a poor way to describe what is happening), if you knew what I know, then yes June looks like a timeframe to be corrected. Then there is the possibility that one SKU is 20% faster than the other.

 

[Nisaaru]

The only sensible reason I can imagine for hiding Zen is avoiding price perception problems for AMD with Ryzen CPU/APUs.

 

[Jay]

What's the thoughts on them dropping HDMI in, with their current position on PiP for the current HDMI in current OS?

 

[BRiT]

What's the thoughts on them dropping HDMI in, with their current position on PiP for the current HDMI in current OS?

I figure they removed SNAP and have no plans to add PIP for HDMI-In viewing while gaming, which is a hard de-emphasis of TV. This is part of their plan. Perhaps it means no HDMI-In for Scorpio. Perhaps not. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

However it would simplify their support surface area, where you cant do TV and Game at the same time. It also means they wouldn't need to upgrade the HDMI-In hardware to support "4K" signals. They likely wouldnt want to be limited to 1080p HDMI-In on a console they're hyping as "4K" every chance they get.

 

[ProspectorPete]

It would massively free up system resources as well, removing PIP (or hdmi-in alltogether)

 

[Scott_Arm]

I think it's unlikely that scorpio has hdmi in.