Digital Foundry: next-gen PlayStation and Xbox to use AMD's 8-core CPU and Radeon HD

[monstercameron]

That was sarcastic. What does CPU have to do with resolution?

my sarcasm detector didnt detect it, nvm.

 

[tweakboy]

That is a weak processor. Intel would have smoked that, but I guess they wanted to much money or something. So the CPU aint great and the graphics from ATI will do justice as well.

 

[ShintaiDK]

That was sarcastic. What does CPU have to do with resolution?
One does not lower resolution when his CPU is having hard time. Quite the opposite. If you are CPU bound, you max out graphics to tax GPU more while maintaining the same frame rates as before.

If you read the article, you would notice the Xbox One already got 2 bottlenecks. GPU too slow and need downscaling. And CPU too weak and needed a boost, besides the usual removal of features and simplication.

Also the CPU handles draw calls for the GPU.

 

[Zstream]

Put yourself in the unenviable position of being a project manager for hardware inside a software-based company which means all your peers are delivering silly high margins next to your division's paltry margins.

That puts a different bit of internal pressure on your bonuses, your annual targets, stretch goals, etc.

If I were a Microsoft guy, tired of looking like I'm the one dragging down corporate's average margins and tired of being looked at by me internal management peers as being the ugly duckling of the bunch, I'd be shooting to do anything I could to boost margins - however transitory and temporary it may be - with the initial product launch of Xbox One.

To be sure there will be a price drop triggered once some pre-defined unit volume threshold has been crossed. Maybe a $25 or $50 price drop once the first 3m units sell retail, or after 3 months, whichever happens first.

But milking the margins on the first early adopters, very much a corporate pressure situation going on at Microsoft which is not present at a true hardware-based corporation like Sony.

Totally agree! I wish companies would put the revenue game on the sales force and if they aren't selling, start looking internal and look at why a product isn't going anywhere. Instead, you have to plan on margins, revenue goals and constraints within your business unit. This is the WRONG way of doing business. If this product is a board initiative, it needs full backing.

 

[seitur]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-the-xbox-one-architects

Yet more info, and its not good.

Heavily CPU limited before release.


How long are these consoles expected to last? 1-2 years?

Kinda explain why Sony seem determined to allow developers to push everything single possible to do thing on GPU and a reason for quite severe changes they made on GCN architecture.

btw. anyone know if someone finally figured how to effeficently process skeletal meshes on GPU or is that still CPU task ?

 

[Arzachel]

If you read the article, you would notice the Xbox One already got 2 bottlenecks. GPU too slow and need downscaling. And CPU too weak and needed a boost, besides the usual removal of features and simplication.

Also the CPU handles draw calls for the GPU.

And consoles are known to need a fraction of draw calls you see on the PC. Unless the devs are allergic to batching, it's probably down to poor multithreading and immature APIs.

 

[Erenhardt]

If you read the article, you would notice the Xbox One already got 2 bottlenecks. GPU too slow and need downscaling. And CPU too weak and needed a boost, besides the usual removal of features and simplication.

Also the CPU handles draw calls for the GPU.

ohhh... so CPU and GPU are bottleneck. Add RAM to that, and a hard drive. So all these things bottleneck HMDI output which could push 18Gbit/s.
If not that, I don't know which part of the console will be held back...

 

[ShintaiDK]

ohhh... so CPU and GPU are bottleneck. Add RAM to that, and a hard drive. So all these things bottleneck HMDI output which could push 18Gbit/s.
If not that, I don't know which part of the console will be held back...

You didnt bother to read the article did you? Its MS saying so, the company behind the console.

 

[krumme]

ohhh... so CPU and GPU are bottleneck. Add RAM to that, and a hard drive. So all these things bottleneck HMDI output which could push 18Gbit/s.
If not that, I don't know which part of the console will be held back...

Why dont you understand this thing is bottleneck because its got no Intel cpu and NV gpu?

 

[Erenhardt]

Why dont you understand this thing is bottleneck because its got no Intel cpu and NV gpu?

Because I'm fanboy and I'm proud of it!

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Also the CPU handles draw calls for the GPU.

The CPU load of draw calls is essentially completely independent of resolution. It takes the same CPU time to render the same scene at 10x10 res and at 1000x1000 res.

 

[Dresdenboy]

Trying multi quote on mobile now..

Anyway, right now, we have 2 (hell, 3 counting Wii U) next-gen consoles with a focus on GPGPU utilization. That's what I'm seeing, and once the industry adapts to this transition, we'll see better results.

Such capabilities won't help in handling higher resolutions, image quality or stereoscopic rendering. GPGPU roughly is resolution agnostic.

like it wasn't obvious that they will be CPU limited from day one with that CPU.

Of course they are. Especially if devs try to further use the 3 SB optimized threads w/o change.

If you read the article, you would notice the Xbox One already got 2 bottlenecks. GPU too slow and need downscaling. And CPU too weak and needed a boost, besides the usual removal of features and simplication.

Also the CPU handles draw calls for the GPU.

Wouldn't less available GPU resources lead to less work for the cores? They'd also only start to be limiting GPU perf. if the multithreaded game and driver code wouldn't be able to saturate them.

ohhh... so CPU and GPU are bottleneck. Add RAM to that, and a hard drive. So all these things bottleneck HMDI output which could push 18Gbit/s.
If not that, I don't know which part of the console will be held back...

A $1000 cost and 500W power limit would've solved this balancing problem.

Why dont you understand this thing is bottleneck because its got no Intel cpu and NV gpu?

A business + environment driven decision maybe. Nvidia GPU+ARM cores or Intel's fast cores and GPU cores with delayed standards support in the past and an Intel fab bound cost model...

Likely Intel did't want the low margins. Their leading edge fabs don't come for free. The products made there have to repay any capex and amortization besides cost of production.

 

[ShintaiDK]

The CPU load of draw calls is essentially completely independent of resolution. It takes the same CPU time to render the same scene at 10x10 res and at 1000x1000 res.

You seem to mix the 2 parts together. The CPU was too slow to handle the FPS desired arcording to MS.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Wouldn't less available GPU resources lead to less work for the cores? They'd also only start to be limiting GPU perf. if the multithreaded game and driver code wouldn't be able to saturate them.

What MS says is, the GPU is too slow to handle 1080p in some cases. And that the CPU is too slow to handle the desired FPS. Not even considering what the other sacrifices in the game development will be when such basic metrics is already a struggle.

At least the PS4 got almost 50% faster GPU that should make 1080p possible in close to all, if not all titles. But they also suffer from the CPU issue at hand.

It really bites both not to go the extra mile to use 4 pilediver/steamroller cores instead.

 

[Blitzvogel]

Not to say GPGPU "fixes" everything, but I'm inclined to argue that the PS4's heavy emphasis towards it should help alleviate any woes about the x86 cores not having the grunt to do their stuff when they can just offload it to the CUs.

 

[Enigmoid]

I dont think they are too weak and even so the jaguar cores are much faster than the older ppc cores.

also the console devs have always tried to maintain a minimum of 30fps so the bolded part is just inflammatory.

Yes but compared to Haswell at 3.5 ghz, kabini at 1.6 ghz is 1/3 the performance for integer and 1/4 the FPU performance.

Assuming perfect scaling and the utilization of all 8 cores kabini is about as fast as and i3 +HT at twice the frequency (3.2 ghz i3 level). Using 6 cores (not exactly sure how many will be used) and taking into account scaling problems you are probably looking at something similar to intel's ULV haswell CPUs at 2.5-2.7 ghz. That, sadly, is going to hold back a 7850 class GPU, ESPECIALLY when you consider that next gen games are not going to be like the current crop of games where graphics to CPU load is heavily unbalanced (adding some features like shadows, etc hurt console ports much more than they should because they are essentially tacked on there without any real optimization, Bioshock infinite is a good example as some features basically halve frame rate for almost imperceptible gains).

High




Max


I don't really expect to see as much of this next gen.

 

[Vesku]

What MS says is, the GPU is too slow to handle 1080p in some cases. And that the CPU is too slow to handle the desired FPS. Not even considering what the other sacrifices in the game development will be when such basic metrics is already a struggle.

At least the PS4 got almost 50% faster GPU that should make 1080p possible in close to all, if not all titles. But they also suffer from the CPU issue at hand.

It really bites both not to go the extra mile to use 4 pilediver/steamroller cores instead.

I don't see how the PS4 will have enough CPU grunt for 1080P but not the XOne. Guess we will hear more from developers a few months after launch but it seems to me MS just went for a lighter GPU and so there is a temptation to just use the XOne art assets for both from a development cost perspective when making games that will sell on both consoles.

 

[Dresdenboy]

There are already more than 1000 postings in this thread.

Did someone mention that offloading audio, or physics from CPU cores, or avoiding memory copying by the CPU (unified mem or memcopy engines) leave CPU cycles free to do other stuff?

 

[William Gaatjes]

I read that someone mentioned x86 cores at 1,6GHz.

The jaguar cores are not really the standard x86 cores.
They are used as 64 bit out of order cores each core with 16 registers and all the extensions like sse and avx that the x86 platform has brought us.
These cores may even have some extra instructions and extensions to better support the GCN part of the jaguar chip.

The unified memory space for the GCN cores and cpu cores.
A more mature programming environment.
Why does Intel not invest more in GPU supported programming ?
Nvidia does it for obvious reasons and AMD does because AMD knows CPU tech and GPU tech.

AMD was bought once by "oil" investors.
It is also after all an "us knows us".

 

[ShintaiDK]

The jaguar cores are not really the standard x86 cores.

They are standard lowend x86 cores. Nothing special.

AMD was bought once by "oil" investors.
It is also after all an "us knows us".

Bought? You mean the arabs that got the fabs cheap and made AMD pay for it twice? And making sure they can milk AMD until 2024 via the mafiastyle WSA? They have zero interest as such in AMD. They just wanted a foundry business.

 

[escrow4]

Should have just stuck a 3.0GHz quad in there instead. That CPU is going to come back and bite them in the ass. So an i3 @ 3.4GHz despite having 2 cores/2 hyperthreaded will still be sufficient?

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Should have just stuck a 3.0GHz quad in there instead. That CPU is going to come back and bite them in the ass. So an i3 @ 3.4GHz despite having 2 cores/2 hyperthreaded will still be sufficient?

Why does no one understand that the CPU choice for these consoles was entirely due to power constraints.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Why does no one understand that the CPU choice for these consoles was entirely due to power constraints.

Thats not true. Not to mention 8 jaguar cores are anything but low power and could easily be replaced.

 

[Saylick]

Thats not true. Not to mention 8 jaguar cores are anything but low power and could easily be replaced.

Looking up AT's article on Kabini, it looks like 8 Jaguar cores might fit within the power envelope of a dual-core Ivy, but of course the article is measuring platform power and not specifically from the cores.

 

[SiliconWars]

8 Jaguar cores at 1.6GHz will have similar multi-threaded performance to a 3GHz i3, while pulling around half the power.

The important thing is the cores are not acting as a severe bottleneck, judging by this review of the A6-5200 - http://adrenaline.uol.com.br/biblioteca/analise/784/amd-a6-5200-kabini.html?pg=5

There you can see 4x2GHz is capable of matching anything else AMD has including the FX-8350 in gpu bound scenarios.