Console hardware: what Sony/MS went with versus what they should have

[ShintaiDK]

I think a lot of people or forgetting the extra costs and time a $200 APU would incur. More power = bigger power supply with better cooling, more expensive motherboard/components, bigger/powerful fan/heatsink. Since everything would be bigger, a larger case would have to be used. Heavier components = more cost to ship to final assembly. Then more shipping costs when shipping to wholesalers - and yet again when shipping to retail markets.

On top of that, it would take twice the FAB space to produce the chips in the same amount of time.

Point being, a $200 APU would move the price up closer to $200 not just $100.

The Xbox One cooler is already way overdimentioned. And the PS4 PSU for example is 250W.

And a 200$ APU for that matter wouldnt even need to draw more power. It could, but its not needed to be faster.

 

[AnandThenMan]

The Xbox One cooler is already way overdimentioned. And the PS4 PSU for example is 250W.

And a 200$ APU for that matter wouldnt even need to draw more power. It could, but its not needed to be faster.

How do you propose faster clocks/perf without any increase in power.

 

[Lepton87]

This is really interesting - didn't know this....

As you state, this really means half the cores (4 of the 8) really are left to OS and other tasks and the game itself, without substantial penalties, is limited to 4 pretty slow cores. Wow...

.

It's not that big of a problem as you might think, Core 2 Quad is the same as was Pentium D while Phenom was a native quad core. We all know which one is better.
ps. Why do you guys need 8GB of memory for just the GPU? Hell, even my Titan does not have that much, not that it needs it. 4GB would be more than enough, remember 8GB of memory is shared between CPU and GPU and 2 of that is reserved for the system, so 8GB would be more GPU memory than current consoles could possibly use even assuming no memory allocated to the CPU which is impossible.

But even with 2 memory pools. You dont need 2x8GB. You would need something like ~2GB and ~6GB.
__________________

I never thought I would almost agree with Shintai. I think 2GB would be a bit too little, make it 3GB.

 

[ShintaiDK]

How do you propose faster clocks/perf without any increase in power.

Increase transistorcount.

 

[AnandThenMan]

Increase transistorcount.

 

[Erenhardt]

Increase transistorcount.

isn't:
xtor = leak
true?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Increase transistor count, lower clocks slightly, gain overall more performance. Its nothing new.

 

[ShintaiDK]

isn't:
xtor = leak
true?

How do you define the power consumption of a chip?

 

[Erenhardt]

So you want to double the apu performance by doubling CUs, which requires doubling transistor count, which in turn doubles power consumption, which you want to deny by lowering clocks (and performance -goal?)?

Your advice would be laughed at Sony and MS.
Who will pay for all those transistors?

Consoles are not running top possible clocks.
Consoles run high voltage to increase usable dies.
I think 500MHz GPU behemoth chip is not financially viable for anyone but nvidia premium titan brand

 

[ShintaiDK]

So you want to double the apu performance by doubling CUs, which requires doubling transistor count, which in turn doubles power consumption, which you want to deny by lowering clocks (and performance -goal?)?

Your advice would be laughed at Sony and MS.
Who will pay for all those transistors?

Consoles are not running top possible clocks.
Consoles run high voltage to increase usable dies.
I think 500MHz GPU behemoth chip is not financially viable for anyone but nvidia premium titan brand

Who said anything about double the performance?

 

[Erenhardt]

Who said anything about double the performance?

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37048930&postcount=119

Thats no contradiction and the thread makes no sence, there is no way for me or anyone else to know what AMD or anyone else could have offered for $200.

if an 8 Core jaguar + HD7870 costs just $100, i can extrapolate that to $100 CPU (2x Athlon 5150) + $150 GPU ($180 R9 270 - $30 for 2GB of GDDR5), and if i double that i end up with a retail $200 cpu + $300 gpu in a similar range to the $200 APU Sony could have got. Needless to say for that money you get a I5 and a 290x to give you some idea.

Again this thread makes no sence, there is no way but to guess at what could have been done.

 

[ShintaiDK]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=37048930&postcount=119

No, the current context comes from here.

How do you propose faster clocks/perf without any increase in power.

 

[Erenhardt]

I though we talked about $200 apu

The Xbox One cooler is already way overdimentioned. And the PS4 PSU for example is 250W.

And a 200$ APU for that matter wouldnt even need to draw more power. It could, but its not needed to be faster.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I though we talked about $200 apu

Yes. And 200$ doesnt mean it needs to be twice as fast. Also a 200$ APU would add around 20% to the total cost.

The essense of the context was, how would you fit a faster APU without having to change other parts.

 

[Erenhardt]

Yes. And 200$ doesnt mean it needs to be twice as fast. Also a 200$ APU would add around 20% to the total cost.

The essense of the context was, how would you fit a faster APU without having to change other parts.

You are all over the place! Hard to keep up with you
Yep. $200 means it only needs to be twice as expensive. Nothing more actually. :whiste:

So you propose to make it bigger but run on lower clocks.
This will make perf/$ even worst.
What would be cheaper, make everything slightly bigger, but keep the die small and running at 800MHz. Or keep the rest of the system the same but make bigger chip (30 CU=150%) clocked at say 600Mhz=75% for a grand total 12.5% performance increase at the same power consumption.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Increase transistor count, lower clocks slightly, gain overall more performance. Its nothing new.

For GPU performance I get that, but for CPU performance isn't that kind of a 'more cores, but slower cores' route?

 

[ShintaiDK]

You are all over the place! Hard to keep up with you
Yep. $200 means it only needs to be twice as expensive. Nothing more actually. :whiste:

So you propose to make it bigger but run on lower clocks.
This will make perf/$ even worst.
What would be cheaper, make everything slightly bigger, but keep the die small and running at 800MHz. Or keep the rest of the system the same but make bigger chip (30 CU=150%) clocked at say 600Mhz=75% for a grand total 12.5% performance increase at the same power consumption.

Irrelevant. The conext was about how a 200$ APU would be faster without having to replace other parts.

 

[ShintaiDK]

For GPU performance I get that, but for CPU performance isn't that kind of a 'more cores, but slower cores' route?

You can balance the reduced power budget towards the CPU. So more power used by CPU, less for the GPU. And/or replace the CPU uarch.

 

[itsmydamnation]

You can balance the reduced power budget towards the CPU. So more power used by CPU, less for the GPU. And/or replace the CPU uarch.

and yet both sony and MS could have done this if they thought that was a good idea, if they wanted to blow 50 watts of their TDP they could have run there 8 cores @ 2.4ghz, thats 50/33% ( depending which way you want to count) more perf.

Yet they didn't, instead of living in yesterdays world why dont you go read some dev blogs about what work loads devs are planning to move off the CPU and onto the GPU thax to the large converged memory system + GCN compute capabilities.

A good example is compute shader based particle system, little interaction with the CPU required, much faster on average and orders of magnitude faster in the worst case.

here i'll even do some of the work for you(going to Google):
http://www.slideshare.net/DevCentra...ndering-using-direct-compute-by-gareth-thomas

 

[AnandThenMan]

You are all over the place!

I've read his posts several times and still don't know exactly what he's getting at. The only thing I can take away from it is the APU was the right move except it should have been tweaked, or different, or something.

 

[Enigmoid]

and yet both sony and MS could have done this if they thought that was a good idea, if they wanted to blow 50 watts for their TDP they could have run there 8 cores @ 2.4ghz, thats 50/33% ( depending which way you want to count) more perf.

There is no die binning for the console chips. 2.4 ghz would be out of the reach of the vast majority of chips produced increasing costs.

 

[AnandThenMan]

There is no die binning for the console chips.

Makes sense seeing there is only one clock speed version. But at the same time AMD seems very conservative with their APUs it's usually very easy to push them past stock clocks.

 

[SlowSpyder]

You can balance the reduced power budget towards the CPU. So more power used by CPU, less for the GPU. And/or replace the CPU uarch.

I see. I guess that'd work, but the thing is I'm not sure how much TDP headroom there is to be gained. Having 1152 SP's at 800MHz vs. having 1728 SP's at 535Mhz, how much thermal headroom for the CPU is really freed up? And at what cost change for the APU?

 

[tential]

Why are we hard set in this TDP range? We could just extend the console size 10-20%. Lets be real here, 10-20% larger console would not have anyone say "Nope not purchasing this!"

These are console gamers with 2 options and most are already stuck on their option. If the PS4/XboxOne released slightly larger than they are now, people will still pick up their respectively "favorite" console.

 

[AnandThenMan]

There was a target that MS/Sony went for, cost/heat/performance/form factor. Could things have been done better? Maybe, but remember these consoles are over a year old at this point so have to keep that in mind when talking about faster APUs and the like.