S|A : "Microsoft XBox Next will use an x86 AMD APU instead of PowerPC"

[Olikan]

If AMD is serious about getting the consoles this generation they will have to hand over both the CPU and GPU designs to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo and then collect royalties. They've done it before with the GPUs and now that AMD no longer needs to manufacture the CPUs as per the old agreement with Intel, they are free to do so with the CPUs as well. IF they are willing.

AMD no longers needs it's own fabs to manufacture...

anyway...good catch!

... M$ or Sony, would need permission to produce x86 chips from Intel

unless AMD is manufactoring (at GF, TSMC) and selling....
or the latest lawsuits pretty much made AMD a co-owner of x86

 

[Pilum]

If AMD is serious about getting the consoles this generation they will have to hand over both the CPU and GPU designs to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo and then collect royalties. They've done it before with the GPUs and now that AMD no longer needs to manufacture the CPUs as per the old agreement with Intel, they are free to do so with the CPUs as well. IF they are willing.

The problem in this scenario: it wouldn't be AMD letting their x86 CPUs being manufactured at some foundry, it would be MS/Sony/Nintendo letting their x86 CPUs being manufactured at some foundry. For which they'd need a license from Intel. While I'm sure Intel will gladly provide such licenses, I'm not so sure the console companies will like the conditions.

 

[Arzachel]

MS had problems with nVidia? How so. The GPUs are fully controlled by console makers. Its a onetime design sell for AMD/nVidia. They get around 50mio$ and never see a penny again.

MS wants to control the manufactoring process. AMD doesnt make GPUs. MS does. AMD only sold them a design. Thats simply not possible for x86. And who can guarantee that AMD is alive in its current form in 5 years?

Look above. And why would they pick a company with capacity problems and a history filled with delivery issues. Same reason Apple dont and never will use AMD.

This is a valid line of thought but even by just reading this thread you can piece together why it's wrong.

Exibit 1:

MS had the same problem with Intel with the original Xbox. It was a Pentium 3/128KB L2 733MHz IIRC. Intel never released the design to Microsoft to be integrated with the GPU in later process generations (not like Nvidia agreed to that either as shown above).

If AMD is serious about getting the consoles this generation they will have to hand over both the CPU and GPU designs to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo and then collect royalties. They've done it before with the GPUs and now that AMD no longer needs to manufacture the CPUs as per the old agreement with Intel, they are free to do so with the CPUs as well. IF they are willing.

AMD licenses the designs themselves, Microsoft takes care of manufacturing by outsourcing that to a third party. With the AMD and GF split, Intel argued that the x86 license only extended to AMD and such only AMD itself can manufacture their chips. BUT:

Exibit 2:

AMD no longers needs it's own fabs to manufacture...

anyway...good catch!

... M$ or Sony, would need permission to produce x86 chips from Intel

unless AMD is manufactoring (at GF, TSMC) and selling....
or the latest lawsuits pretty much made AMD a co-owner of x86

Court decided that AMD was in the right and could let 3rd parties fab their designs. BUT:

Exibit 3:

The problem in this scenario: it wouldn't be AMD letting their x86 CPUs being manufactured at some foundry, it would be MS/Sony/Nintendo letting their x86 CPUs being manufactured at some foundry. For which they'd need a license from Intel. While I'm sure Intel will gladly provide such licenses, I'm not so sure the console companies will like the conditions.

If they license x86 chip designs is the x86 license still valid? And we come back to the quote that Oilkan dug up that some of you dismissed as spin:

So, time for a little speculation. Oban is being made by IBM primarily, so that almost definitively puts to bed the idea of an x86 CPU that has been floating. We said we were 99+% sure that the XBox Next/720 is a Power PC CPU plus an ATI GCN/HD7000/Southern Islands GPU, and with this last data point, we are now confident that it is 99.9+%. Why? Several licensing agreements that cover what can be made where will enrich a fleet of lawyers if Oban is x86, but do not preclude the possibility entirely, hence the last .1%

That 0.1% means that AMD has gotten the right to license x86 chip designs without voiding their agreement with Intel. If that's true, the implications are pretty huge. It essentially allows them to take up a business model similar to ARM.

EDIT: Or maybe the contract with Microsoft binds AMD to port the design for some fee, that would work too.

 

[Lonbjerg]

LOL....so people think APU level for "performance" is the shizzle now.

Welcome to a new stupid hardware lock that will stagnate games for years to come...until the next crapbox...and the the circle is complete...and can start all over now.

 

[nehalem256]

MS had the same problem with Intel with the original Xbox. It was a Pentium 3/128KB L2 733MHz IIRC. Intel never released the design to Microsoft to be integrated with the GPU in later process generations (not like Nvidia agreed to that either as shown above).

If they use an APU then the CPU and GPU are already integrated.

 

[Ancalagon44]

MS had problems with nVidia? How so. The GPUs are fully controlled by console makers. Its a onetime design sell for AMD/nVidia. They get around 50mio$ and never see a penny again.

MS wants to control the manufactoring process. AMD doesnt make GPUs. MS does. AMD only sold them a design. Thats simply not possible for x86. And who can guarantee that AMD is alive in its current form in 5 years?



Look above. And why would they pick a company with capacity problems and a history filled with delivery issues. Same reason Apple dont and never will use AMD.

There is a post a few above mine detailing the issues, strange you dont remember that. Its part of the reason that the Nvidia FX cards fared badly against Radeon 9XXX cards - it was to do with DirectX standards regarding colour space if I remember correctly. ATI used 24 bits, whereas Nvidia used 32 bits, which was not actually required by the MS spec. Caused massive issues.

Anyway, I doubt there is much that could not be negotiated around. MS might be willing to let AMD fab the chips for them, provided they could be assured that costs would drop in the future. Why are you so insistent that MS would not use a solution whereby AMD provided the engineering and say TSMC or GlobalFoundries guaranteed capacity for them? Do you not have confidence in MS's lawyers and their ability to put together a good enough contract?

 

[Arkaign]

LOL....so people think APU level for "performance" is the shizzle now.

Welcome to a new stupid hardware lock that will stagnate games for years to come...until the next crapbox...and the the circle is complete...and can start all over now.

Yeah I'm really confused by why this would be a great idea (other than 'cheap').

What we need for a good baseline for the new consoles :

CPU power on the range of a 2500k
GPU power on the range of a 7950, with at least 2GB VRAM
At least 8GB of ram @ 1600mhz
SSD @ 128GB
USB 3.0 + REAL External Storage support

Anything less will be a real disappointment, but pretty likely imho. We'll probably see something that's actually weaker in some ways compared to the current 360/PS3, or only marginally more powerful.

 

[Lonbjerg]

Yeah I'm really confused by why this would be a great idea (other than 'cheap').

What we need for a good baseline for the new consoles :

CPU power on the range of a 2500k
GPU power on the range of a 7950, with at least 2GB VRAM
At least 8GB of ram @ 1600mhz
SSD @ 128GB
USB 3.0 + REAL External Storage support

Anything less will be a real disappointment, but pretty likely imho. We'll probably see something that's actually weaker in some ways compared to the current 360/PS3, or only marginally more powerful.

Hype.
It's always hype when it comes to consoles.
And now APU level of "performance" is going to be hyped as the shizzle.

It's retarded, it's face-to-desk-stupid...but at least it shows how underpowered consoles are...and always will be.

 

[sm625]

All I know is a game console able to take a windows install would eviscerate a lot of PC sales.... along with sales of a lot of intel chips. Who is going to buy a desktop for $xxx when an xbox can do the same thing? No way a pc can compete on price with a mass produced commodity console. This opens the door for microsoft to engineer an actual tablet pc chip that has all the correct parts. (No stupid bridge chips and lots of graphics power.)

If the yields are really bad on these things then you have to start thinking about what microsoft could do with a bunch of x86 chips with partially defective gpus. I would say "z-box" but that name is already taken. But if you know what a z-box is then you pretty much get the general idea. Think ultra-low cost budget PCs.

 

[NTMBK]

Re: APUs and performance- don't forget, this will be a custom modified design, with specialised operating system. Microsoft could easily squeeze more power out of the APU by using the same memory model that was used on the 360, shared between CPU+GPU portions, instead of the split PC memory model. This could easily be coupled with some superfast RAM- the 360 used GDDR3, faster than the typical DDR2 of the desktops of the day. Today's equivalent would be GDDR5. As Toms Hardware have demonstrated, the LLano graphics were already very sensitive to memory bandwidth: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-a8-3850-llano,2975-6.html

So shared memory model (avoiding copying around that happens in PCs), higher memory bandwidth to remove the bottleneck on the IGP- this is basically the APU unleashed, and a dream scenario for AMD's design.

EDIT: And don't forget the possibility of on-package eDRAM, like the 360 had.

 

[Arkadrel]

Yeah I'm really confused by why this would be a great idea (other than 'cheap').

What we need for a good baseline for the new consoles :

CPU power on the range of a 2500k
GPU power on the range of a 7950, with at least 2GB VRAM
At least 8GB of ram @ 1600mhz
SSD @ 128GB
USB 3.0 + REAL External Storage support

Anything less will be a real disappointment, but pretty likely imho. We'll probably see something that's actually weaker in some ways compared to the current 360/PS3, or only marginally more powerful.

So you want a Xbox or Playstation that costs: ~700$+ ?

Re: APUs and performance- don't forget, this will be a custom modified design, with specialised operating system. Microsoft could easily squeeze more power out of the APU by using the same memory model that was used on the 360, shared between CPU+GPU portions, instead of the split PC memory model. This could easily be coupled with some superfast RAM- the 360 used GDDR3, faster than the typical DDR2 of the desktops of the day. Today's equivalent would be GDDR5. As Toms Hardware have demonstrated, the LLano graphics were already very sensitive to memory bandwidth: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...no,2975-6.html

So shared memory model (avoiding copying around that happens in PCs), higher memory bandwidth to remove the bottleneck on the IGP- this is basically the APU unleashed, and a dream scenario for AMD's design.

Yep the APU actually makes sense in a consol, its just a matter of getting the GPU portion big enough

 

[Lonbjerg]

All I know is a game console able to take a windows install would eviscerate a lot of PC sales.... along with sales of a lot of intel chips. Who is going to buy a desktop for $xxx when an xbox can do the same thing? No way a pc can compete on price with a mass produced commodity console. This opens the door for microsoft to engineer an actual tablet pc chip that has all the correct parts. (No stupid bridge chips and lots of graphics power.)

If the yields are really bad on these things then you have to start thinking about what microsoft could do with a bunch of x86 chips with partially defective gpus. I would say "z-box" but that name is already taken. But if you know what a z-box is then you pretty much get the general idea. Think ultra-low cost budget PCs.

Any gamer who don't feel that an IGP is gamer-class...

 

[Lonbjerg]

Yep the APU actually makes sense in a consol, its just a matter of getting the GPU portion big enough

So magic pixie-fairies are being hyped now?

 

[Arkaign]

So you want a Xbox or Playstation that costs: ~700$+ ?


Yep the APU actually makes sense in a consol, its just a matter of getting the GPU portion big enough

If it's not going to be a real leap from the 360/PS3, then what's the point?

 

[Vdubchaos]

Who cares?

It will still limit people and be on par with mid range PC the day it come out (just like all other consoles).

 

[Ancalagon44]

If it's not going to be a real leap from the 360/PS3, then what's the point?

At this point, even a 4670 would be a considerable leap, nevermind a 7770.

 

[exar333]

AMD no longers needs it's own fabs to manufacture...

anyway...good catch!

... M$ or Sony, would need permission to produce x86 chips from Intel

unless AMD is manufactoring (at GF, TSMC) and selling....
or the latest lawsuits pretty much made AMD a co-owner of x86

That really gets annoying. Why isn't there a disparaging short-hand for every company that wants to make money? Oh wait, ALL companies want to make money...:thumbsdown:

 

[NTMBK]

So magic pixie-fairies are being hyped now?

:\ There is no inherent reason why an integrated CPU + GPU should be slower than on separate dies- in fact, their theoretical maximum performance should be much higher. Putting them together reduces latencies and eliminates bandwidth issues. The revamped XBox 360 has its CPU and GPU on the same die, and they actually had to add silicon to make the chip to make them slower to maintain compatibility with the original two chip design- look at the section about the "FSB Replacement" here http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/...th-cpugpu-combo-chip/?comments=1#comments-bar .

The next generation of AMD APUs (Jaguar, Kaveri) use GCN shaders, the same as the top of the line AMD GPUs. If AMD produce an APU die for the 360 with a very large number of GCN shaders, paired with a fast memory like GDDR5, then that would be equivalent to a high end discrete card. And total system performance would be better due to the elimination of the PCIe bus bottleneck. Not to mention that with a shared memory pool, you would no longer need costly main memory to graphics memory copies which the current generation of APUs use for legacy reasons (i.e. pretending to by a discrete GPU and CPU to existing games and frameworks).

 

[Lonbjerg]

:\ There is no inherent reason why an integrated CPU + GPU should be slower than on separate dies- in fact, their theoretical maximum performance should be much higher. Putting them together reduces latencies and eliminates bandwidth issues. The revamped XBox 360 has its CPU and GPU on the same die, and they actually had to add silicon to make the chip to make them slower to maintain compatibility with the original two chip design- look at the section about the "FSB Replacement" here http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/...th-cpugpu-combo-chip/?comments=1#comments-bar .

The next generation of AMD APUs (Jaguar, Kaveri) use GCN shaders, the same as the top of the line AMD GPUs. If AMD produce an APU die for the 360 with a very large number of GCN shaders, paired with a fast memory like GDDR5, then that would be equivalent to a high end discrete card. And total system performance would be better due to the elimination of the PCIe bus bottleneck. Not to mention that with a shared memory pool, you would no longer need costly main memory to graphics memory copies which the current generation of APUs use for legacy reasons (i.e. pretending to by a discrete GPU and CPU to existing games and frameworks).

My GPU smakcs any IGP...sorry, but you are dead wrong.
And the "performance" of an IGP...compared to a GPU...is wel...just sad.

You can hype it all you want to..just find oneone else than me...because I don't buy your *beep*

There is a reason why the CPU and GPU are still seperate in performance PC land...if you wanted the same power in a single die...it would be a dead end today.

 

[Vdubchaos]

:\ There is no inherent reason why an integrated CPU + GPU should be slower than on separate dies- in fact, their theoretical maximum performance should be much higher. Putting them together reduces latencies and eliminates bandwidth issues. The revamped XBox 360 has its CPU and GPU on the same die, and they actually had to add silicon to make the chip to make them slower to maintain compatibility with the original two chip design- look at the section about the "FSB Replacement" here http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/...th-cpugpu-combo-chip/?comments=1#comments-bar .

Since has there been an issue with CPU and GPU being on seperate boards?

WTF are you talking about willis?

 

[Ferzerp]

My GPU smakcs any IGP...sorry, but you are dead wrong.
And the "performance" of an IGP...compared to a GPU...is wel...just sad.

You can hype it all you want to..just find oneone else than me...because I don't buy your *beep*

There is a reason why the CPU and GPU are still seperate in performance PC land...if you wanted the same power in a single die...it would be a dead end today.

Oh, it's perfectly doable, but it would be a giant die with such poor yields that it would be so expensive that no one would be willing to make it. For example, the bare minimum (which wouldn't happen because interconnects would need to be created) for a 4 module BD with a 7970 die tacked on would be 700mm^2. For reference, westmere-EX die size is only 513mm^2, and the ones with all cores functional cost $2500 each minimum. Opteron 6200 series die size is 316mm^2 (could be wrong here, wasn't easy to find).

 

[NTMBK]

My GPU smakcs any IGP...sorry, but you are dead wrong.
And the "performance" of an IGP...compared to a GPU...is wel...just sad.

You can hype it all you want to..just find oneone else than me...because I don't buy your *beep*

There is a reason why the CPU and GPU are still seperate in performance PC land...if you wanted the same power in a single die...it would be a dead end today.

Any current IGP in a PC, sure. There are several reasons for that: current APU graphics parts have tiny numbers of shaders compared to their discrete counterparts, they are choked by the slow memory bus of current CPUs (would you buy any top end graphics card using DDR3?), and they are forced to use a separate subset of the memory pool and perform copies between the "CPU bit" and the "GPU bit".

But this is a custom design for Microsoft, and the delays Semiaccurate are talking about indicate that this is a large and complex die. Meaning that it is very likely that it is stuffed full of shaders.

1) Large die, indicating lots of shaders
2) Very fast memory bus (judging from past example of 360 using GDDR3)
3) Shared memory pool eliminating a major chokepoint in current PC implementations (again, based on the 360's example)

This could be a very nicely performing APU.

 

[Arzachel]

My GPU smakcs any IGP...sorry, but you are dead wrong.
And the "performance" of an IGP...compared to a GPU...is wel...just sad.

You can hype it all you want to..just find oneone else than me...because I don't buy your *beep*

There is a reason why the CPU and GPU are still seperate in performance PC land...if you wanted the same power in a single die...it would be a dead end today.

Yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about. iGPUs have better perf/w, perf/mm^2 if properly fed and far lower latency.

 

[NTMBK]

Oh, it's perfectly doable, but it would be a giant die with such poor yields that it would be so expensive that no one would be willing to make it. For example, the bare minimum (which wouldn't happen because interconnects would need to be created) for a 4 module BD with a 7970 die tacked on would be 700mm^2. For reference, westmere-EX die size is only 513mm^2, and the ones with all cores functional cost $2500 each minimum. Opteron 6200 series die size is 316mm^2 (could be wrong here, wasn't easy to find).

Well, the Semiaccurate article is talking about absolutely atrocious yields on this new die. Microsoft may go this way in the hope that future process improvement will let them shrink the die to a manageable size (see how they combined the CPU and GPU into an APU on their latest process node shrink).

Since has there been an issue with CPU and GPU being on seperate boards?

WTF are you talking about willis?

It's a simple fact that you will need to copy segments of memory from CPU memory, across a bus, into GPU memory in a two-board solution (or any split memory solution, for that matter). This is a hit to performance- and one reason why the 360 did better against the PS3 than people at first expected, as the PS3 had a split memory architecture, unlike the shared pool of the 360.

I've written and worked on plenty of GPGPU code using discrete boards, and I know first hand how much of a bottleneck the PCIe bus can be.

 

[Ferzerp]

Yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about. iGPUs have better perf/w, perf/mm^2 if properly fed and far lower latency.

And far, far, far, far (repeat many times) worse perf:$ if you want actual performance because of the massive die size that would be required to compete with discrete performance.