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Will new consoles benefit AMD?

Montosaurous said:
With the new consoles using 8 core AMD CPUs, do you think games will be better optimized for AMD FX 8xxx than the i5?
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Doubt it, even with 8 cores, Jaguar doesn't have more throughput than an i3. Any CPU workload that trouble an i5 would basically make the game unplayable on a console.
 
Well, I guess the logic is since console games will be threaded for 8 cores, so will PC games because of porting and all that good stuff.
 
Montosaurous said:
Well, I guess the logic is since console games will be threaded for 8 cores, so will PC games because of porting and all that good stuff.
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But due to per core weakness of Jaguar, compared to desktop x86, each thread can only do so much work. If developers don't change the CPU load for the PC port, then a desktop i5 can finish the same CPU work in half the time of Jaguar.
 
Yes, but assuming the FX 8xxx is faster than the i5 in terms of multithreaded performance, it would benefit more IF PC games are coded to have use 8 cores. That is a really big IF right now.
 
As they optimize more, all high core/thread count CPUs will benefit. That could take anywhere from a year (that's faster than I would dare to hope for) to the console's final years (also pretty unlikely). I'm willing to bet between 2 years and 4 years.
 
The problem is games by very nature are extremely hard to develop to use with high % more than like 4 cores .
Because in games data has to wait so much it can't calculate ahead . It has to wait on user input and any user results in the game world .

What they can do though is support for better AI, physic , networking any any background process in game world if it is dynamic .
 
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Centauri said:
FX chips, like the one the OP specifically stated as an example, are not Jaguar based.
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But the point is the console CPUs are, and even with 8 cores they are weak compared to desktop x86 and the amount of work they can do pales in comparison to an i5.
 
If most games used only 4 full cores AMD would be in much better shape in gaming already, but the problem is there are still a lot that are very single-threaded, like Skryim for example.

On the other hand we can clearly see that the i3 can't match the i5 in a lot of games too. I read somewhere that the average game uses about 2.5 cores (not sure if that includes the OS and background processes), so even with HT the i3's lose a lot.

I think 4 real cores will be good enough for a couple more years but make no mistake that gaming is heading towards utilising 8 cores at some level - every core that is used frees up performance in the main threads as well so that can only help AMD. There's also no reason to believe that AMD's single-threaded weakness is going to continue with Steamroller so keep that in mind.
 
"Utilizing 8" is highly questionable considering how the weaker cores on the consoles actually have to run the OS/system tasks too. Tasks that the i5/i7's can easily do with much lower utilization on the same cores that the game use considering the higher IPC. If the consoles had used a full speed FX 8xxx then Intel might have had some worries, but I don't foresee the SB/IB i7's being outperformed by Jaguar cores in games in the lifetime of these consoles. The IPC difference is just too great.
 
Sure but my point was that having 8 cores will no longer be a drawback for AMD, ie no more cores sitting idle while the games are being squeezed into one or two of them (then being handicapped again by the stupid module system of bulldozer). That's why I think quads will still be good for 2 years yet, but we're seeing changes already even without the console effect.
 
CakeMonster said:
"Utilizing 8" is highly questionable considering how the weaker cores on the consoles actually have to run the OS/system tasks too. Tasks that the i5/i7's can easily do with much lower utilization on the same cores that the game use considering the higher IPC. If the consoles had used a full speed FX 8xxx then Intel might have had some worries, but I don't foresee the SB/IB i7's being outperformed by Jaguar cores in games in the lifetime of these consoles. The IPC difference is just too great.
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If the console is anything like a PC environment, I would think the system utilization is relatively low during a game. In windows, if you're not doing anything system related, it usually uses up from 0-3%.
 
Accord99 said:
Doubt it, even with 8 cores, Jaguar doesn't have more throughput than an i3. Any CPU workload that trouble an i5 would basically make the game unplayable on a console.
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Missing the point he is asking if the development of games in an X86 enviroment for this 8 core cpu make it easier for game developers to utilize more cores when shifting to PC development or porting.

Accord99 said:
But due to per core weakness of Jaguar, compared to desktop x86, each thread can only do so much work. If developers don't change the CPU load for the PC port, then a desktop i5 can finish the same CPU work in half the time of Jaguar.
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That's a good point. But then again if it was straight port that way, wouldn't it still run better on a system that had 8 active threads? But I think the key is getting a game to more dynamically grab CPU resources.

Accord99 said:
But the point is the console CPUs are, and even with 8 cores they are weak compared to desktop x86 and the amount of work they can do pales in comparison to an i5.
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Again missing the point it isn't the workload that he is wondering about. An i3 might be able to more in less time than Jaguar (haven't looked at the numbers). I think the point is that by using a high core count but slow CPU as the every day game development system would it help AMD with developers actually utilizing their 8 core CPU's in modern eye candy games.

I would say yes. These cores by themselves are so slow that it will force developers to really get into the nature of proper multithreading to maintain decent performance.
 
Actually what theoretically should benefit most is APUs, since their architecture is more similar to the consoles. But an APU will always be a weak sister to a discrete card in a high end gaming rig.

I think it is too soon to say really. Probably the trend will be toward more multithreading, which should benefit FX. How much remains to be seen, and also I expect there will be a fair number of games that will like fewer, faster cores, like blizzard games and some other mmos and indie games.

I also am not sure how many of the cores of the jaguar apus will be devoted to other tasks such as kinect on the xbox, and streaming/recording gameplay on PS4.
 
I think that Crysis 3, whose engine was developed for next-gen, is a clear indication that future games will benefit from more cores than four.
BF3's multiplayer also shows an advantage on six/eight core CPUs.

I hope that features like AVX, and other instruction sets, will be used more on the PC now that the consoles get support for them
 
Accord99 said:
But the point is the console CPUs are, and even with 8 cores they are weak compared to desktop x86 and the amount of work they can do pales in comparison to an i5.
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This is actually an argument in favor of what the OP is suggesting. Because the 8 core Jaguar is weaker per-thread, developers will have to do the work to parallelize their code to get good performance on the console. The work of parallelizing the source code is only done once, and then it is ported in its parallelized form to the PCs, where we have CPUs like the FX 8350. The console CPUs and the FX 8350 both support 8 threads, and we already said that the code is parallelized up to at least 8 threads, so the FX will be more fully utilized than it usually is in games today.

Given this, the FX 8350 might pull ahead of the IVB i5 in more games than it does today.
 
I think they'll be better in that they will perform a little better on AMD processors than they would have otherwise, but I don't think it will help them perform better than Intel.
 
sefsefsefsef said:
This is actually an argument in favor of what the OP is suggesting. Because the 8 core Jaguar is weaker per-thread, developers will have to do the work to parallelize their code to get good performance on the console.
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The assumption here would be that each thread is continuously working and never stops, so that a faster processor would not finish faster, but rather do more work.

However, considering that the current-gen consoles are even weaker per core and also require significant multi-threading to extract good performance, and the console ports still don't benefit much from more than 2 cores often, I think it is more likely that a developer limits the CPU workload to something manageable that the console CPU can handle. The PC port will have the same amount of work, but just finish it faster.
 
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