The real reasons Microsoft and Sony chose AMD for consoles [F]

[krumme]

Wow, that is quite the minority position you're taking.

Damn i had to use google to know what this wii u is
http://m.gamespot.com/news/nintendo-turns-a-profit-but-misses-sales-forecast-by-half-6407454

I guess sales will catch up

 

[krumme]

Wrong example imho. It'd be more like if you were giving me the option to expand my business of selling self-made cookies, but you only want to buy loads of cheaper ones without chocolate chips. The rest of my business model consists of selling varying amounts of premium cookies for premium prices (meaning, fluctuating income) and filling up my spare time with selling very cheap ingredients in town (e.g. flash).
So, I already know how to make cookies, I have possibly enough time and ovens to do so, I only need to create a good enough dough (which is an investment I'd have to do, yes) and calculate the costs to give you my price.
But the general consensus in this thread seemed to be that I didn't even bother to reply to you because I don't want to bake cheap cookies (but I'm fine selling cheap ingreadients?).

Haha. Made my day.

 

[Phynaz]

I find it curious that you use an idiom when asked for an example.

So, are you saying that companies never turn down business?

 

[SiliconWars]

So, are you saying that companies never turn down business?

No of course not.

In the end, if you attempt to win a design and end up not winning it, you lose. You can say you pulled out of the deal or whatever you want but in the end some other company is reaping the rewards of your loss.

As I've mentioned previously, I highly doubt Intel even attempted or was considered at any time for consoles. ROI may well have been a factor but Intel isn't adverse to taking losses to harm others who are in shaky positions. The most likely scenario is they realised they'd be wasting their own and Sony's/Microsofts time and simply didn't bother.

Perhaps they thought that Nvidia and AMD would play against each other like they normally do, and there would be a split? These are the kind of games Intel likes to play, and normally plays very well. In this case they appear to have lost out as AMD has been given total console dominance and a major lifeline that the company can build around over many years.

 

[krumme]

Do we have any BOM estimates for the PS4? as compared to the PS3 at startup?

 

[chernobog]

I know that this seventh generation lasted for 7-8 years while it will be alive for next 2 years but slowly dying, I heard people talking that this eight generation will last 10 years. If that happens then AMD has 10 years of worth revenue from Xbox One and PlayStation 4 while Nintendo will catch up with its next console that will be probavly called Wii X(Xenomorph) that has hibrid controls of Wii and Wii U with VR glasses! lol

I doubt AMD's margins are razor slim since it supplies both CPU and GPU for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 thus its margins should be 15-20%. If you only supply one component then you can expect slim margins but if you supply two components then you can expect decent margins.

AMD will get a lot of love from game developers since AMD give them what they needed and that is unified memory. ATI buy out does not seem as a bad move anymore.

 

[Phynaz]

I doubt AMD's margins are razor slim since it supplies both CPU and GPU for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 thus its margins should be 15-20%. If

15-20% margins in the semiconductor business and you are out of business.

 

[chernobog]

15-20% margins in the semiconductor business and you are out of business.

Yea if you are sellling a ordinary CPU and GPU except we are talking about consoles that will sell for millions and millions of units yearly.

If AMD manages to get 100$ per chip and margins are 20 or even 40% then they would be swimming in the pool full of 100$ bills :wub:

Some analyst companies estimated that AMD profits from consoles will be about 300M$ per year, that's a lot of money that can help AMD breaking even with no going down in the red.

AMD's revenue from consoles will be 2-3B$

 

[Vesku]

Amazing that there are posters who still think "Intel could totally build a Radeon 7870 equivalent. Doesn't matter that even extrapolating out HD 5200 would make that chip bigger, on a smaller node, and more power hungry than either AMD or Nvidia GPUs. They could totally do it."

The only true performance competitive alternative to AMD for 2013 Consoles would be an Intel + Nvidia combo and it's pretty easy to see why that would be troublesome from a business and technical integration aspect.

 

[chernobog]

Amazing that there are posters who still think "Intel could totally build a Radeon 7870 equivalent. Doesn't matter that even extrapolating out HD 5200 would make that chip bigger, on a smaller node, and more power hungry than either AMD or Nvidia GPUs. They could totally do it."

The only true performance competitive alternative to AMD for 2013 Consoles would be an Intel + Nvidia combo and it's pretty easy to see why that would be troublesome from a business and technical integration aspect.

Agreed, even if Intel would ever made a prototype the price of it would skyrocket and I can bet my elvis that AMD would do a much stronger chip for the same price.

 

[ViRGE]

I don't know if it's the heat or if happy hour has started early, but several of you are getting a little fiery. This is nothing infraction worthy (yet), but it needs to come down a notch before it gets there. There's no reason to be this angry.

Most of you are wrong at some point or another; get over it.

-ViRGE

 

[blackened23]

I only make mistakes on Mondays, but today isn't Monday.

 

[galego]

This is part of the tech for which AMD is powering the consoles

http://gamingbolt.com/mark-cerny-explains-the-ps4s-gpu-can-perform-asynchronous-complex-processes

 

[Silverforce11]

15-20% margins in the semiconductor business and you are out of business.

Except they are not in the semiconductor business, that's for GloFo and TSMC to worry about, with billions of investments for new nodes.

20% margins for IP and SoC design business after paying for R&D that covers other products of your stack, (ie. these designs will inevitably find their way into consumer APUs) is pretty damn good when it moves in the volumes of hundreds of millions for both consoles.

Not only in terms of raw profit, which with those volumes, would be massive.. but in terms of the entire next-gen development across multiple platform would be running on AMD's ecosystem. Guess what happens when they optimize games for 8 cores and radeon GCN? Pretty sure there's obvious benefits for their core market right there down the road, for many years to come.

 

[beginner99]

Guess what happens when they optimize games for 8 cores and radeon GCN?

Trouble for NV as a best-case scenario. Those 8 CPU cores are ultra week and keep in mind that at least 1 is reserved for the OS, mabye 2. And a quad-core haswell is way faster than 6 Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz even in multi-threaded workloads and even the i5 version without HT.

 

[NostaSeronx]

Those 8 CPU cores are ultra week and keep in mind that at least 1 is reserved for the OS, mabye 2.

Nope, out-of-order core can't be reserved like in-order cores. All 8-cores will be dedicated to either the Operating System, Gaming, or whatever is happening.
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So, do you guys think Sony will put F@H on the PS4?

 

[ViRGE]

Nope, out-of-order core can't be reserved like in-order cores.

OoE cores can be reserved like any other. It's a simple matter of OS scheduling, there's nothing on a technical level that prevents any kind of core from being reserved. Whether Sony will do it is another matter, but they absolutely have the means to.

 

[NostaSeronx]

OoE cores can be reserved like any other.

Point to an OoOE processor that has reserved threading for one aspect. Seems kind of pointless since it can process out of order.

@ShintaiDK
The Xbox One and Playstation 4, APU SoCs are HSA enabled and can run HSAIL code. They both run hUMA which has the CPU & GPU running in the same physical and virtual space.

 

[ViRGE]

Point to an OoOE processor that has reserved threading for one aspect. Seems kind of pointless since it can process out of order.

Huh? OOE is not even about threading. OOE is about IPC. Executing instructions out of order allows you to potentially improve IPC by shuffling instructions around to keep various ports utilized more often. An OOE core is still executing one thread by default; two if there's SMT.

I suspect you're thinking at the wrong level here. It's not the hardware that's reserving the core, it's the operating system. The operating system would be making sure nothing but OS processes can be scheduled to a given core, typically in conjuction with a hypervisor so that the guest OS can't even see the core that has been reserved. VMWare Workstation for example makes this trivial, and that's not even a low level hypervisor.

 

[Vesku]

As Virge has stated an OS can reserve physical cores at least with conventional general purpose CPUs. The OS handles the resource allocation.

 

[NostaSeronx]

I suspect you're thinking at the wrong level here. It's not the hardware that's reserving the core, it's the operating system.

1 SPE/1 PowerPC in-order core reserved to run operating system threads for the last gen. These are permanently reserved to run OS tasks.

With Jaguar in the Xbox One and Playstation 4. The only reason to run an OS task on a core indefinitely is for stability reasons. While, that core is working on the OS tasks, it can also operate on different tasks.

In-order generally is reserved to one task.
Out-of-order is not generally reserved to one task and can operate on multiple tasks.

 

[ViRGE]

1 SPE/1 PowerPC in-order core reserved to run operating system threads for the last gen. These are permanently reserved to run OS tasks.

With Jaguar in the Xbox One and Playstation 4. The only reason to run an OS task on a core indefinitely is for stability reasons. While, that core is working on the OS tasks, it can also operate on different tasks.

In-order generally is reserved to one task.
Out-of-order is not generally reserved to one task and can operate on multiple tasks.

Reserving a SPE for the OS served two purposes. The first is rather straightforward: it reserves resources for the OS, so that the OS always has a minimum resource pool to work from.

The second (and apparently less known) purpose of reserving that SPE on the PS3 was for security. Specifically, it was the core tasked with operating the hypervisor that sandboxed the OS that programs ran in. This prevented programs from having low-level hardware access in order to keep the console from being hacked (particularly from the at the time allowed Linux mode).

An OOE processor changes none of that. Reserving resources for the OS is still a good idea - although we don't know for sure at this time what Sony is doing - as an OOE processor is about improving IPC. OOE does not improve multithreading performance, since the CPU can only work on one thread at a time; OOE does not allow a CPU to work on multiple threads at the same time. If a thread is a task than an OOE processor cannot work on multiple tasks any more than an in-order processor can, it can only reschedule operations within that thread.

In any case, the second reason an OOE processor doesn't change the need to reserve a core is for the security reasons listed above. Only by completely blocking user threads from executing on the same core as the OS can you guarantee that those user threads aren't trying to read the OS's memory pages (there's supposed to be process isolation, but of course intentional glitches can be used to get past that). This is no different for Jaguar than it was for Cell. You're still going to need to dedicate a core to the OS if you want to sandbox the user environment for security purposes.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Except they are not in the semiconductor business, that's for GloFo and TSMC to worry about, with billions of investments for new nodes.

20% margins for IP and SoC design business after paying for R&D that covers other products of your stack, (ie. these designs will inevitably find their way into consumer APUs) is pretty damn good when it moves in the volumes of hundreds of millions for both consoles.

Not only in terms of raw profit, which with those volumes, would be massive.. but in terms of the entire next-gen development across multiple platform would be running on AMD's ecosystem. Guess what happens when they optimize games for 8 cores and radeon GCN? Pretty sure there's obvious benefits for their core market right there down the road, for many years to come.

Chipdesigns cost alot more than nodes. R&D wise Intel might use something like 2B on nodes and 6B on chips. AMD might not even be able to afford lower node chip designs right now. Also why we will see 28nm vs 14nm.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Trouble for NV as a best-case scenario. Those 8 CPU cores are ultra week and keep in mind that at least 1 is reserved for the OS, mabye 2. And a quad-core haswell is way faster than 6 Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz even in multi-threaded workloads and even the i5 version without HT.

Even a dualcore is faster than 6 Jaguar cores.

 

[NostaSeronx]

Reserving a SPE for the OS served two purposes. The first is rather straightforward: it reserves resources for the OS, so that the OS always has a minimum resource pool to work from.

The second (and apparently less known) purpose of reserving that SPE on the PS3 was for security. Specifically, it was the core tasked with operating the hypervisor that sandboxed the OS that programs ran in. This prevented programs from having low-level hardware access in order to keep the console from being hacked (particularly from the at the time allowed Linux mode).

An OOE processor changes none of that. Reserving resources for the OS is still a good idea - although we don't know for sure at this time what Sony is doing - as an OOE processor is about improving IPC. OOE does not improve multithreading performance, since the CPU can only work on one thread at a time; OOE does not allow a CPU to work on multiple threads at the same time. If a thread is a task than an OOE processor cannot work on multiple tasks any more than an in-order processor can, it can only reschedule operations within that thread.

In any case, the second reason an OOE processor doesn't change the need to reserve a core is for the security reasons listed above. Only by completely blocking user threads from executing on the same core as the OS can you guarantee that those user threads aren't trying to read the OS's memory pages (there's supposed to be process isolation, but of course intentional glitches can be used to get past that). This is no different for Jaguar than it was for Cell. You're still going to need to dedicate a core to the OS if you want to sandbox the user environment for security purposes.

Well none of what you said will be in Xbox One or Playstation 4. Xbox One will be using what Windows 8.1 will be using which allows different cores to access the Hypervisor/etc parts. Playstation 4 is using a modified FreeBSD that is basically tuned to be a reversed engineered Windows 8.1. You hack Playstation 4, you can hack Xbox One, and vice versa.

No cores are reserved for any tasks, all cores are tuned to operate with latency in mind. If the OS needs something done it will always go to the least used core, not some reserved core.
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http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35206078&postcount=188
^--- I'll put this here, my last on topic post.

@ViRGE, Just send me a PM, why I am wrong.
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