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

[ViRGE]

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.

As it happens my background is operating systems, so I'm just going to dive off of the deep end right here.

FreeBSD is not in any way a "a reversed engineered Windows 8.1". FreeBSD as a project was started 20 years ago (back in 1993), and is one of the True Successors to BSD Unix, which if you follow the tree back to the beginning, gives it a direct lineage to the original Unics itself. Which is to say that FreeBSD is essentially among the oldest of the operating systems in existence.

I won't get into whether it (or any other OS) is superior to anything else, but it goes without saying that it has been used in servers and appliances alike for many, many years now. In terms of under the hood functionality and security it is among the cutting edge of operating systems, especially multi-processor and multi-user systems given its server background. So to say FreeBSD is reverse engineered from Windows 8.1 is absurd. Both because there's simply no reason to - what thread scheduling technology would they steal from Windows, exactly? And because Windows 8.1 isn't even out yet, the preview having been released just last week.

Second of all, it's entirely possible this is a problem on my end, but I absolutely cannot grok "Xbox One will be using what Windows 8.1 will be using which allows different cores to access the Hypervisor/etc parts". So if my reply is off base here I apologize. But in any case, any guest of a hypervisor is limited to the resources it is allocated; this is a functional purpose of a hypervisor, to allow the sharing of resources. Furthermore this doesn't change the fact that if you need tight security, then you're still going to isolate the OS. No software can change this. It's damn near laws of physics materials, as if you have user code and the OS within the same space, then you can (with enough effort) glitch memory pages and start reading off of the OS's memory pages. So if a hypervisor is setup to isolate the OS, then that's exactly what's going to happen.

Finally, "You hack Playstation 4, you can hack Xbox One, and vice versa" is very much not true. The OS differences alone will make the two of them operate very differently at a low level. Hacking one may expose how the hardware works at a general level, but even then there are some important differences between the two (eSRAM, interconnects, etc) that mean that low-level hacks on one may not work on the other. Even if a given low-level hack was the same, you're still back to dealing with the differences in the OSes, which is everything from memory management to how kernel modules are loaded.

I would encourage you to spend some time to watch this video, which is one of the Team Fail0verflow presentations where the PS3 cryto hack was first unveiled. They spend some time going into how the PS3's hypervisor system worked. I say that because Sony's hypervisor system is still a very good example of how security hypervisors are implemented, even after all of these years (just be sure to randomize your ECC Initialization Vector).

---

The point of all this being that yes, you can reserve a core on an OOE processor (since it's a function of the OS + Hypervisor, not the hardware). And in fact good security practices dictate you should. So Sony is very much capable of reserving one of the 8 Jaguar cores on PS4 for the OS, and they have a very good reason to.

 

[Arkaign]

Jaguar is a joke on the CPU side of things, but I don't think it will matter much with the console gaming world too much. The low frequency is somewhat bothersome. I really think a 3.2Ghz Quad w/HT would have been immensely less limiting, but $$ + TDP = no go there.

But really, think about it. Even sticking with AMD entirely :

FX 6350 + 7950 would have been staggeringly more capable long-term.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Jaguar is a joke on the CPU side of things, but I don't think it will matter much with the console gaming world too much. The low frequency is somewhat bothersome. I really think a 3.2Ghz Quad w/HT would have been immensely less limiting, but $$ + TDP = no go there.

But really, think about it. Even sticking with AMD entirely :

FX 6350 + 7950 would have been staggeringly more capable long-term.

It was obvious that this geenration of consoles would be discount solutions. After MS and Sony lost 3B$ and 5B$ on the previous ones.

The first and second gen PS3 shipped with a 380W PSU, followed by a 280W for third gen. And looking on the PS3, I doubt TDP was the real issue. Its all about $$.

 

[zlatan]

But the PS4 is not HSA. And it wont take HSA anywhere.

The new consoles will support the main HSA features.

AMD has two HSA ready APUs (Trinity and Richland). These don't support the main HSA functions, but using the built-in HSA-MMU hardware (IOMMUv2), there will be some compatibility. Kaveri will be the first APU that support all the main HSA features. Kaveri will also support exactly the same feature set as the Xbox One and PS4.

On the GPU side ARM support the main HSA features with Mali-T600, but you can't use it now, because the Mali design don't support the 32 bit ARM instruction set. But with ARMv8 cores, and with a new Corelink interface, the Mali-T600 is also very good for HSA. The nextgen Qualcomm SoC with the Adreno 4xx iGPU will be also HSA ready.

Technically the NVIDIA Parker SoC will be also a very good integration. I think NVIDIA won't provide any HSA finalizer, but in theory they cloud support the main HSA features.
The Maxwell archtecture is designed to support the ARMv8 virtual address format, so it can use unified virtual memory with ARMv8, and also unified address space.
Maxwell is technically a GCN by NVIDIA. These mostly support the same features. The main differences is that you need to use a compatible host processor to achieve these extras. NVIDIA will take the ARMv8 road, and AMD will support the x86-64 or AMD64 ISA.

There is still no specification for HSA that 3rd party can use.

Here is the reference manual.

 

[NostaSeronx]

@zlatan, AMD Piledriver CPUs are HSA-able but VLIW4 isn't.

Jaguar/Piledriver/Graphic Core Next/IOMMUv2 are the requirements for HSA/HSAIL, even in non-APU forms.

Steamroller/Playstation 4/Xbox One uses IOMMUv2.5 and Graphic Core Next and meet all the available current requirements for HSA/HSAIL.

 

[zlatan]

@zlatan, AMD Piledriver CPUs are HSA-able but VLIW4 isn't.

To run an HSA app you don't need a TLB for the GPU multiprocessors. The physical->physical address translation with IOMMUv2 is enough. It won't be a fast solution, but it will works.

Also with the legacy mode, you doesn't need a GPU to run an HSA app.

 

[SiliconWars]

Jaguar is a joke on the CPU side of things, but I don't think it will matter much with the console gaming world too much. The low frequency is somewhat bothersome. I really think a 3.2Ghz Quad w/HT would have been immensely less limiting, but $$ + TDP = no go there.

But really, think about it. Even sticking with AMD entirely :

FX 6350 + 7950 would have been staggeringly more capable long-term.

Yeah good luck with a 300W console. Not to mention that's one very large piece of silicon that needs cooling.

 

[3DVagabond]

Anyway, I'm not so sure why some here are going to extreme lengths to discredit AMD

Because people are butthurt their favorite brand's components aren't being used. Therefore it's not because their favorite brand failed or couldn't compete, it's because AMD is going out of business and doesn't care if they don't make money. Of course Sony and M$ are so stupid that they have hung the fate of their next gen consoles on inferior components by a company that's going to fail. Too bad they didn't ask these forum goers what they should have done. Oh well, too late now. It is what it is.

 

[3DVagabond]

Call Newegg and tell them you want an A10-6800 for $89. I'll bet you they will walk away from that deal.

That's not at all how a deal like the PS4 would have gone down. Try to make a reasonable comparison that can add to the debate.

 

[lopri]

That is a poorly-titled (or wonderfully-titled, depending on how you look at it) article. The dude basically lists some common sense ingredients (yah AMD happens to have CPU and GPU techs) as if he found some behind-the-scene conspiracy.

 

[NTMBK]

As it happens my background is operating systems, so I'm just going to dive off of the deep end right here.

FreeBSD is not in any way a "a reversed engineered Windows 8.1". FreeBSD as a project was started 20 years ago (back in 1993), and is one of the True Successors to BSD Unix, which if you follow the tree back to the beginning, gives it a direct lineage to the original Unics itself. Which is to say that FreeBSD is essentially among the oldest of the operating systems in existence.

I won't get into whether it (or any other OS) is superior to anything else, but it goes without saying that it has been used in servers and appliances alike for many, many years now. In terms of under the hood functionality and security it is among the cutting edge of operating systems, especially multi-processor and multi-user systems given its server background. So to say FreeBSD is reverse engineered from Windows 8.1 is absurd. Both because there's simply no reason to - what thread scheduling technology would they steal from Windows, exactly? And because Windows 8.1 isn't even out yet, the preview having been released just last week.

Second of all, it's entirely possible this is a problem on my end, but I absolutely cannot grok "Xbox One will be using what Windows 8.1 will be using which allows different cores to access the Hypervisor/etc parts". So if my reply is off base here I apologize. But in any case, any guest of a hypervisor is limited to the resources it is allocated; this is a functional purpose of a hypervisor, to allow the sharing of resources. Furthermore this doesn't change the fact that if you need tight security, then you're still going to isolate the OS. No software can change this. It's damn near laws of physics materials, as if you have user code and the OS within the same space, then you can (with enough effort) glitch memory pages and start reading off of the OS's memory pages. So if a hypervisor is setup to isolate the OS, then that's exactly what's going to happen.

Finally, "You hack Playstation 4, you can hack Xbox One, and vice versa" is very much not true. The OS differences alone will make the two of them operate very differently at a low level. Hacking one may expose how the hardware works at a general level, but even then there are some important differences between the two (eSRAM, interconnects, etc) that mean that low-level hacks on one may not work on the other. Even if a given low-level hack was the same, you're still back to dealing with the differences in the OSes, which is everything from memory management to how kernel modules are loaded.

I would encourage you to spend some time to watch this video, which is one of the Team Fail0verflow presentations where the PS3 cryto hack was first unveiled. They spend some time going into how the PS3's hypervisor system worked. I say that because Sony's hypervisor system is still a very good example of how security hypervisors are implemented, even after all of these years (just be sure to randomize your ECC Initialization Vector).

---

The point of all this being that yes, you can reserve a core on an OOE processor (since it's a function of the OS + Hypervisor, not the hardware). And in fact good security practices dictate you should. So Sony is very much capable of reserving one of the 8 Jaguar cores on PS4 for the OS, and they have a very good reason to.

*applause*

 

[NTMBK]

Also, one thing to consider about why getting the console wins would have been a good thing for Intel- fab utilisation. Console chips are only shrunk/refreshed rarely, and generally lag behind the leading edge. For instance the latest 360 chip is still on a 45nm GloFo process. A really big chip on older processes seems like an excellent way for Intel to use those older fabs.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Also, one thing to consider about why getting the console wins would have been a good thing for Intel- fab utilisation. Console chips are only shrunk/refreshed rarely, and generally lag behind the leading edge. For instance the latest 360 chip is still on a 45nm GloFo process. A really big chip on older processes seems like an excellent way for Intel to use those older fabs.

But Intel dont keep old fabs. Intel only needs highend fabs in their business model.

 

[NTMBK]

But Intel dont keep old fabs. Intel only needs highend fabs in their business model.

I thought that they used the older fabs for e.g. chipsets?

 

[ShintaiDK]

I thought that they used the older fabs for e.g. chipsets?

32nm? I only think Fab 11X makes 32nm today.

 

[insertcarehere]

Also, one thing to consider about why getting the console wins would have been a good thing for Intel- fab utilisation. Console chips are only shrunk/refreshed rarely, and generally lag behind the leading edge. For instance the latest 360 chip is still on a 45nm GloFo process. A really big chip on older processes seems like an excellent way for Intel to use those older fabs.

Except, that chip was shrunk from what was originally a 90nm process, therefore would be small on 45nm, while a new console chip would be huge and expensive on 45nm, probably more so than smaller processes.

 

[mrmt]

I thought that they used the older fabs for e.g. chipsets?

They did, until this generation. Current generation will be mostly comprised of SoCs, so there won't be too many legacy demand for these fabs. With Broadwell things get even worse.

I can't recall where but I read that Intel might use 22nm fabs to manufacture L4 packages for 14nm SKUs.

 

[galego]

As shown repetitively on the PS4 thread, 4 jaguar cores have about the same performance than 2 sandy bridge cores with hiperthreading. This is the reason why an i7 (4C+HT) is being selected in any PC-console comparison.

Moreover, those jaguar cores are improved, via HSA, by the compute units. Only 4 CUs provide 410 extra GFLOPS for tasks such as physics simulations. See the link given in #288 about asynchronous computation capabilities:

PS4's GPU is not only limited to handling the graphics but also complex processes which is traditionally handled by the CPU.

Physics simulation, collision detection, ray casting for audio, decompression and the like.

A linux/unix operative system has several advantages over W8, including higher performance. But again the version of W8 used in the Xbox1 will be a striped down version (not the bloated one in the PC).

Microsoft had no chance than choose one of their OS.

Sony could choose both Linux or FreeBSD. I suppose they chose FreeBSD for the license, because I cannot see any technical advantage over linux.

The cores can be reserved for a given task. The Killzone demo apparently shows two cores reserved for OS/background tasks and locks each one of the 6 gaming threads to a single core.

 

[showb1z]

As shown repetitively on the PS4 thread, 4 jaguar cores have about the same theoretical performance than 2 sandy bridge cores with hiperthreading at the same clockspeed.

FTFY

 

[krumme]

FTFY

Whatever. Jaguar is 3.5mm2 on 28nm. Its a performance monster for the mm2 and the cost. 128 bit wide fpu, avx and hsa for next to nothing. A 28nm wafer is what 1500-2000usd?. The marginal production cost of the bare jaguar core with L1 cache is less than half a dollar. Comparing haswell to this is not remotely interesting. Its like proposing a bmw 5 series for public transport in Chinas eastern provinces.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Comparing haswell to this is not remotely interesting.

The original comparison was with SB...

 

[krumme]

The original comparison was with SB...

Ok you can choose between a bmw 525, 530 or 535 for public transport in eastern china

 

[Essence_of_War]

Heh heh, what I get for pedantry

 

[krumme]

Heh heh, what I get for pedantry

I was hoping you would ask for the 540 model, because thats the Iris Pro eco edition. The eco means you save 2 usd each time your private driver fill the tank

 

[galego]

FTFY

In reality some unix benchmarks showing a 4T (4C) 2GHz kabini being about a 12% faster than a 4T (2C+HT) 2.5GHz sandy bridge were given in that thread.