- Mar 10, 2017
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It is a rather solid rumor that MS has scheduled a second version of the new XBox that is targeted at more modest performance targets, mainly 1080p video, with 8GB ram and 4TFlop graphics power. My question is around what actual processor will be used for this?
I speculate that the processor used won't be a product of the semi-custom group, and will, instead, be a custom binned Van Gogh APU.
Why?
I believe that the suggested performance targets are achievable with Van Gogh as it is speculated to be configured. The CPU and RAM side are the easy parts. It's hitting the 4 Tflop of graphics performance that's going to be the biggest hurdle. Currently, that is roughly the throughput of the 5500m. So, the question is, can they integrate enough RDNA2 CUs into an APU? Looking at what they've done with Vega 8 on rwnoir, they seem willing to go with fewer CUs at higher clock speeds. If we use the 5500 as a ballpark, doubling the CUs in the APU from Renoir gives you 16CUs. With a modest clock speed bump, that's in the ballpark of 4 Tflop of GPU throughput. With a process Change to N5, that should be able to live in roughly the same die size as Renoir.
The next issue is RAM throughput. Full spec, dual channel DDR5 is expected to provid about 100 GB/ sec of throughput. While that is about half of the throughput of the 5500m, it's still enough to keep up with the demands of a reasonable texture quality setting.
Finally, we have I/O. The big deal there with the PS5 and XBoxsX is their need to stream vast amounts of data to keep up with the needs of high quality 4K textures. If we allow for more modest texture quality, both the active memory footprint and the second by second data access needs shrink significantly, allowing the use of a commodity, cacheless NVME drive to be more than sufficient.
Any thoughts?
I speculate that the processor used won't be a product of the semi-custom group, and will, instead, be a custom binned Van Gogh APU.
Why?
I believe that the suggested performance targets are achievable with Van Gogh as it is speculated to be configured. The CPU and RAM side are the easy parts. It's hitting the 4 Tflop of graphics performance that's going to be the biggest hurdle. Currently, that is roughly the throughput of the 5500m. So, the question is, can they integrate enough RDNA2 CUs into an APU? Looking at what they've done with Vega 8 on rwnoir, they seem willing to go with fewer CUs at higher clock speeds. If we use the 5500 as a ballpark, doubling the CUs in the APU from Renoir gives you 16CUs. With a modest clock speed bump, that's in the ballpark of 4 Tflop of GPU throughput. With a process Change to N5, that should be able to live in roughly the same die size as Renoir.
The next issue is RAM throughput. Full spec, dual channel DDR5 is expected to provid about 100 GB/ sec of throughput. While that is about half of the throughput of the 5500m, it's still enough to keep up with the demands of a reasonable texture quality setting.
Finally, we have I/O. The big deal there with the PS5 and XBoxsX is their need to stream vast amounts of data to keep up with the needs of high quality 4K textures. If we allow for more modest texture quality, both the active memory footprint and the second by second data access needs shrink significantly, allowing the use of a commodity, cacheless NVME drive to be more than sufficient.
Any thoughts?