Are the next gen consoles the realization of AMDs HSA dream?

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AnandThenMan

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2004
3,949
504
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We will just have to wait and see, but I'm confident the skeptics will be proven wrong. The response from the various game devs has been extremely positive, this is not just hype from Sony, which you should automatically discount.

But like I said, some seem to completely ignore the big picture. Having an AMD64 based architecture in both Sony and MS consoles is fantastic for the PC side of things. I doubt I will buy any of these consoles, but I certainly look forward to what we will see ported over. I also really, really want to see the unified memory design on the PC side, give me a CPU that has access to GDDR5 style memory please.
 

Sleepingforest

Platinum Member
Nov 18, 2012
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I'm looking forward to the PS4 because I love the Gran Turismo series. That being said, I feel like many people here are hyping it up to be much more than it is. It'll be beyond the reach of PCs for a year or two (console exclusives, which may be more highly optimized, will probably look and run better than ported competitors for an extra year), but as always, PC power catches up fast.

I hope that AMD suceeds with the unified memoy too, if only to offer more budget options. I'm a little skeptical of GDDR5 though, because the costs are so high.
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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Are they really though? The Xbox 360 not only had an unified memory architecture, but was also more powerful than any consumer PC hardware by double or more in terms of GFLOPS, even the top end cards like the Geforce 6800 Ultra and Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. The XBox 360 became "weak" in only a few years because of how fast GPUs improve.

The PS4 can't even claim to produce more TFLOPS than top end cards (the 7970 gets something like 3.79 TFLOPS in single-percision). Sure, it's stronger than any console we've seen yet. But relative to the desktop tech, it's not that great.

The Geforce 7800 (with about the same GFLOPS than the Xbox 360) was released the same year.

Moreover the Xbox was not a APU design and the unified memory only simplified programming; it was not designed for increasing the performance (in fact the PS3 with its non-unified memory had faster bandwidths).
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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I don't think that's what some of us are arguing.


More the fact that - people are crazy to expect a low power, low IPC, low clocked x86 CISC design to somehow magicly be able to make a 7850ish design (under more rough locked power constraints) do 1080p 60 fps with 4x MSAA.

You save some latency and gpu cycles on sharing memory....but that's it.
UNIFIED doesn't magicly give a 50% increase in performance.

The exact same hype from NEARLY(look it up, during ps3 launch) the same studios were going on.

The fact is if you do a direct flop tests - the DX overheard has shrunk overtime. Especially with win7 and dx11.

You miss or simply avoid about a 90% of what was summarized in

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34885997&postcount=103

It's going to be even worse in the long run because:
A. Weaker pure raw performance that last generation
B. Faster and easier development for developers allows no down the road optimizations gains as big as the last generation.

They're gonna end up in that hole 2011 games were - where PC was so monstrously ahead in both quality and resolution it's a joke.

That's gonna happen in 2015 Q3 now.

A) Compared to what? I hope that by "pure raw performance" you do not mean TFLOP figures out of any context.

B) It goes just on the other side, with game developers such as Carmack recognizing that they were never able to obtain all the hidden potential from the PS3.
 
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galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
1,091
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We will just have to wait and see, but I'm confident the skeptics will be proven wrong. The response from the various game devs has been extremely positive, this is not just hype from Sony, which you should automatically discount.

But like I said, some seem to completely ignore the big picture. Having an AMD64 based architecture in both Sony and MS consoles is fantastic for the PC side of things. I doubt I will buy any of these consoles, but I certainly look forward to what we will see ported over. I also really, really want to see the unified memory design on the PC side, give me a CPU that has access to GDDR5 style memory please.

I agree with this 100%.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
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Nothing is different here, just the labels have changed. But psychologically it is all the same. Rinse and repeat.
There, I disagree. The new XBox will have enough embedded RAM to really make use of, both consoles have CPUs that don't completely suck at being CPUs, both consoles will have acceptable amounts of CPU cache, both consoles will have acceptable amounts of RAM, and not split up, and neither one will have to go over a high-latency bus to get to CPU or GPU from the other. Last time, the CPUs were starved for everything except vector arithmetic throughput, and the CPUs were slow to begin with. Their on-paper potential never came close to being reached.

The massive expense to make use of broken hardware designs has needed to stop for quite awhile. In the end, you simply can't wring out extra IPC in real code, no matter what the simple synthetic tests can do. All the, "oh, they can optimize as time goes on," crap didn't work. It hasn't worked since the early-mid 90s, when DRAM had latencies similar to today's CPU caches (the PS2's EE being an interesting, "last breath"). No matter how much optimization time you may put in, you can't make up for a bad CPU with more time and effort. L2 is going to be too slow for that, DDR3 is way to slow for that, and GDDR5 will be unbearably slow for that.

"Here's some good, balanced hardware, but with some embedded quirks." <- that's going to be huge improvement, right there.
 

MisterMac

Senior member
Sep 16, 2011
777
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You miss or simply avoid about a 90% of what was summarized in

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=34885997&postcount=103



A) Compared to what? I hope that by "pure raw performance" you do not mean TFLOP figures out of any context.

B) It goes just on the other side, with game developers such as Carmack recognizing that they were never able to obtain all the hidden potential from the PS3.

Didn't miss anything fanboi(AMD or just antipc?).


The "first's" you claim - are the same number "first's" the previous generation had.
And it's clearly noted that comparing to what's maximumly possible under the design rules\power PS4 is weaker comparing to the previous generation.

It's the same cycle.

It's improvement - but jesus christ you'd expect non-improvement over 8 years?!


Try actually read what i wrote - and look up who said what about PS4 - then lookup xbox360/ps3 and who said what.


..it's just repeating itself.
 
Jan 31, 2013
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We will just have to wait and see, but I'm confident the skeptics will be proven wrong. The response from the various game devs has been extremely positive, this is not just hype from Sony, which you should automatically discount.

But like I said, some seem to completely ignore the big picture. Having an AMD64 based architecture in both Sony and MS consoles is fantastic for the PC side of things. I doubt I will buy any of these consoles, but I certainly look forward to what we will see ported over. I also really, really want to see the unified memory design on the PC side, give me a CPU that has access to GDDR5 style memory please.
I don't know why in the world any desktop programmer would be enthusiastic about that.
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
1,091
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There, I disagree. The new XBox will have enough embedded RAM to really make use of, both consoles have CPUs that don't completely suck at being CPUs, both consoles will have acceptable amounts of CPU cache, both consoles will have acceptable amounts of RAM, and not split up, and neither one will have to go over a high-latency bus to get to CPU or GPU from the other. Last time, the CPUs were starved for everything except vector arithmetic throughput, and the CPUs were slow to begin with. Their on-paper potential never came close to being reached.

This summarizes on the "PS4 has not performance bottlenecks" said by Killzone developer.

 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
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This summarizes on the "PS4 has not performance bottlenecks" said by Killzone developer.

What had you expected? D:

The company only develops playstation games and being published by Sony. They would say the moon is a big yellow cheese if Sony said so.

Cell is also the best thing evah said developers!
http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_2.htm
http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/674716/developers-praise-ps3/

Now..can we return to reality instead of all this spin and PR junk?
 
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Arzachel

Senior member
Apr 7, 2011
903
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Didn't miss anything fanboi(AMD or just antipc?).


The "first's" you claim - are the same number "first's" the previous generation had.
And it's clearly noted that comparing to what's maximumly possible under the design rules\power PS4 is weaker comparing to the previous generation.

It's the same cycle.

It's improvement - but jesus christ you'd expect non-improvement over 8 years?!


Try actually read what i wrote - and look up who said what about PS4 - then lookup xbox360/ps3 and who said what.


..it's just repeating itself.

Peak floating point ops is the new clockspeed, it seems. Answer me this, why aren't AMD GPUs several times faster than Nvidia's, even though the peak flop differences are? Why doubling floating point throughput doesn't neccesarily mean double performance?
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
1,091
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What had you expected? D:

The company only develops playstation games and being published by Sony. They would say the moon is a big yellow cheese if Sony said so.

Except that their claim is based in technical data: there is no DDR3 bottlenecks, there is no PCI bottlenecks. The same conclusion is obtained by Cerb, who I was replying.

Cell is also the best thing evah said developers!
http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_2.htm
http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/674716/developers-praise-ps3/

Now..can we return to reality instead of all this spin and PR junk?

There is nothing barely similar in your links, only a group of developers doing rather trivial claims such as:

New hardware always yields more options for developers to create exciting and fresh gameplay experiences.

With the arrival of the next generation computer entertainment system PLAYSTATION 3, I believe it will be possible for graphic expressions, more beautiful than before, to coexist with more deep and evolved game play which utilize the Cell architecture.

And they were right, of course. PS3 brings better graphics, better gameplay... than PS2.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
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I don't know why in the world any desktop programmer would be enthusiastic about that.
Me neither. It might be good for IGP performance, though, since it would keep the pin-count down. It makes much more sense for an embedded device, that's going to be stuck in time for 5-10 years, and which has a GPU that can make some use of that bandwidth all the time, than a PC, which could be hampered by cost, lack of upgradability, and possibly reduced CPU performance when not gaming. But, then again, with IGP performance being one of AMD's strong points...
 
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Sleepingforest

Platinum Member
Nov 18, 2012
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Except that their claim is based in technical data: there is no DDR3 bottlenecks, there is no PCI bottlenecks. The same conclusion is obtained by Cerb, who I was replying.

There is nothing barely similar in your links, only a group of developers doing rather trivial claims.

And they were right, of course. PS3 brings better graphics, better gameplay... than PS2.
Your links don't say anything less vague. They say things like:
So now they’re going hard, man. It’s pretty cool, on all points. I think that it will be really interesting to see what Xbox fires back with. It’ll be an awesome E3.
We’ve got the right amount of memory, video card, everything balanced out. I know it was a very conscious effort to make sure that, with the speed of the memory, the amount of compute units, the speed of the hard-drive that we put in, that there would not be any bottlenecks.
The first quote doesn't even talk about the PS4's ability. That article is praising Sony, not the PS4, for pushing dev kits aggressively and encouraging developers. The second article mentions PC inefficiencies, but fails to mention that the PS4 will also have bottlenecks at the hard drive and is already behind the curve for the GPU.

So these developers are right. Sony has created a strong console and is marketing it well to developers... compared to the PS3.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
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The second article mentions PC inefficiencies, but fails to mention that the PS4 will also have bottlenecks at the hard drive and is already behind the curve for the GPU.
There's also the definition to consider. Being slower than X does not make a bottleneck. Having excess resources somewhere, and inadequate resources elsewhere, causing those resources in excess to wait, makes for a bottleneck. Uniform slowness can be had, without bottlenecks.

Then, some bottlenecks can be designed around. Some can't. Bottlenecks that can't be worked around by some means of caching or multiprocessing will be the worst.

RAM capacity, FI, can't be worked around, with a HDD (the last console to work around it, IIRC, was the N64, by shifting costs to the cart). The PS3 had 256/256MB, and the XB360 512MB, while we had 1024/128-256MB, and rising. RAM was expensive, at the time, but 256MB system RAM, even without a desktop OS, was just sad. 512MB was only marginally better. Sure, we'll be up higher in a few years, but for 1080P, 8GB total should remain plenty to work with.

Likewise, a CPU that can't complete short functions quickly can't be worked around. No amount of using small arrays with prefetch hints (or explicit prefetch instructions--in x86 CPUs, that line is blurred, since most prefetches are ignored, and some are just used for cache prefetch hinting), no amount of spatial trie tricks, no Judy, etc., will save you if the CPU is stalled most of the time, due to L1 misses, branch mispredicts, unpipelinable instructions, multicycle basic ALU instructions, and so on and so forth. The last gen were SIMD beasts, but that's the best that could be said. Too much practical performance was sacrificed to make an embedded real-time-capable HPC chip.

There comes a point where you're just screwed, and have to say, "no, we can't do that, because it takes too much CPU time," even when the CPU looks like it should be really good on paper. Now, some of Jaguar is unknown, but it's safe to assume that it will be faster than Bobcat, on average (maybe not by much, but...). If the vector units can perform 2x that of Bobcat (one of the weaker points of Bobcat, so 1.5-2x would not be unreasonable), it should be quite a nice little CPU, at <=2GHz. Most importantly, such decisions about what can be done and not should be able to predicted with high confidence well ahead of time, on top of it being a fairly nice CPU, assuming there aren't any performance regressions from Bobcat.

Take from the above not that it's going to blow PCs away (with no mouse and keyboard, that will be N/A, regardless, for swaths of games, no matter what the giant SoC can do that's special), but that no dev studio should have to reel in their expectations, nor resulting expressiveness, due the hardware not living up to its hopes. They should more or less know what they're getting into, and won't have to pray for a SPE routine to pull off a miracle, or deal with high-GHz low-efficiency ALUs.

The GPU, honestly, will be what it will be. The raw GPU power was often wasted last time, and making it too good, now, would increase cost and power consumption. That actual game developers had some say in what compromises were made is far more important than the resulting number of processing units in the GPU. If they could have gotten a quad-core and more GPU performance, FI, but by and large preferred more CPUs to make use of, then more CPUs with a bit less GPU performance is the better trade.
 
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galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
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The second article mentions PC inefficiencies, but fails to mention that the PS4 will also have bottlenecks at the hard drive and is already behind the curve for the GPU.

The same quote that you give (pay attention to the boldfaced part):

We’ve got the right amount of memory, video card, everything balanced out. I know it was a very conscious effort to make sure that, with the speed of the memory, the amount of compute units, the speed of the hard-drive that we put in, that there would not be any bottlenecks.
 

Sleepingforest

Platinum Member
Nov 18, 2012
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The same quote that you give (pay attention to the boldfaced part):

In order for this to be true, the CPU and GPU would have to be orders of magnitude weaker than on a PC, or the PS4 must have storage much than anything an SSD can produce. An HDD is a huge loading time bottleneck--just look at load times in Skyrim. I find it VERY hard to believe this claim without proof from raw seek and read times.

I notice you aren't addressing the rest of what I've said though.
 

VulgarDisplay

Diamond Member
Apr 3, 2009
6,193
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One thing I've been wondering about is if we'll see more manufacturer/platform exclusive titles making their way to the PC. With the supposed ease of porting between the new consoles and PC's I would see releasing more of their exclusives onto the PC as a way to get more return on their investment.
 

insertcarehere

Senior member
Jan 17, 2013
639
607
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One thing I've been wondering about is if we'll see more manufacturer/platform exclusive titles making their way to the PC. With the supposed ease of porting between the new consoles and PC's I would see releasing more of their exclusives onto the PC as a way to get more return on their investment.

Well, Dark souls 2 was announced with PC as a lead platform, coming from dark souls which only had a pc port much later than consoles, maybe other developers will trend towards this, with the pc-like architecture of both durango and ps4.
 

galego

Golden Member
Apr 10, 2013
1,091
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In order for this to be true, the CPU and GPU would have to be orders of magnitude weaker than on a PC, or the PS4 must have storage much than anything an SSD can produce. An HDD is a huge loading time bottleneck--just look at load times in Skyrim. I find it VERY hard to believe this claim without proof from raw seek and read times.

Load times? Now you did me laugh.

I notice you aren't addressing the rest of what I've said though.

It is ironic that you say this, when I am still waiting you to address some of my main points or when I am still waiting your answer to some direct question asked to you.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
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Except that their claim is based in technical data: there is no DDR3 bottlenecks, there is no PCI bottlenecks. The same conclusion is obtained by Cerb, who I was replying.

There is nothing barely similar in your links, only a group of developers doing rather trivial claims such as:

And they were right, of course. PS3 brings better graphics, better gameplay... than PS2.

The fact is developers said the exact same thing about the PS3. Nomatter if you like it or not. And said develoeprs, just like now, are financially locked with the Playstation. So it would be silly of them to say anything negative.

You can post as much PR and spin as you wish. Still doesnt change a thing.
 

Olikan

Platinum Member
Sep 23, 2011
2,023
275
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What had you expected? D:

The company only develops playstation games and being published by Sony. They would say the moon is a big yellow cheese if Sony said so.

Cell is also the best thing evah said developers!

Well....Cell is the main reason why PS3 can keep up with the xbox360 gpu, with it's unified shaders and eDRAM

at least for me, that is VERY impressive
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
145
106
Well....Cell is the main reason why PS3 can keep up with the xbox360 gpu, with it's unified shaders and eDRAM

at least for me, that is VERY impressive

I dont think thats the reason. The Cell itself is terrible weak. Its rather the nVidia GPU thats the reason.
 

Arkadrel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2010
3,681
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Do you think that the PS4 APU is a different concept compared to Cell? :) Well no, it's not. The main idea is mostly the same with evolutionary improvements.

the Cell is 1 true core, with 6 simpler SPEs which are capable of less complex operations than the main core.
Vs x86 where each core is the same as each other, and you have 8 of them (in ps4's case).

Id call that a differnt concept.


also:

PS3 never had any GPGPU abilities did it?
OpenCL, AMP++, Directcompute,..

Not Evolutionary Improvements:
PS4 has HSA
PS4 has Unified Address space between CPU & GPU.
PS4 has DirectX11 features (compaired to OpenGL 2.4? of ps3)

Evolutionary improvements
PS4 has 16x the memory. (x16)
PS4 has 1.84 TFLOPS (GPU alone) (vs 364 GFLOPs (total) for ps3 ?) (x5.1)
PS4 has 176 GB/s mem BW. (vs 16.4 / 25.6) (x7 to x10 depending on task)

true shared, unified address space between the CPU and GPU, with common user calls and sharing of data between them. This will eliminate the data copying or wasted bandwith having to reference it indirectly,..
I dont think the PS4 is just evolutionary improvements, Im pretty sure there will be things you can do on a ps4 that cant be done now on a ps3.

Did you see the 1million physics objects demo havok had?
That was said to use a tiny faction of the GPU... and not been possible on a ps3.
 
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