News [Wired] PS5 confirmed to use 7nm Zen 2, Navi, SSD

[beginner99]

This thinking has caused once great companies to disappear. The console dept sells to a unique market and should be run as a distinct profit center. Once you get this 'but we're making more money over there' attitude, watch out.

Never forget Intel and the Apple Iphone as a recent example.

Yeah and having huge volume will become more and more important as design costs rise. Huge volume is given with consoles especially if you provide the hardware for both PS5 and xbox. If one fails, the other one will simply sell even more.

 

[Shivansps]

This thinking has caused once great companies to disappear. The console dept sells to a unique market and should be run as a distinct profit center. Once you get this 'but we're making more money over there' attitude, watch out.

Never forget Intel and the Apple Iphone as a recent example.

Im not against high volume pricing, im pissed we are not going to get anything like that APU.

Not sure what the GPU costs and we don’t know enough about it to make a good guess, but since the CPU is just a Zen chiplet, the cost for AMD to manufacture it has been estimated at ~$20 and that was with current prices. As 7nm wafer prices fall, so does AMD’s cost.

They’re probably not getting rich on these deals, but they help fund Radeon R&D and ensures that games are developed for their hardware in a time when they aren’t selling as many discreet cards.

I belived that for the PS4 SoC because AMD was getting absolutely nothing anywhere, now im not so sure.

 

[JDG1980]

I think it depends on if Navi is capable of using more than 64CUs. If it is not then 14Tflops is probably too far to stretch 64CUs as that requires a 1.8Ghz clock speed and I doubt that will be cheap as you would need to bin the best silicon for the console to use the lowest voltage.

This is assuming that clock speeds on Navi are similar to those on Vega. However, RTG seems to have identified this as a weakness of the architecture and has steadily improved clock speeds the past few iterations - Polaris tops out higher than 28nm GCN, and Vega goes considerably higher than Polaris (and clocks even higher on 7nm Vega 20 than on 14nm Vega 10). Since there's apparently no one in the Chinese RTG development team that understands GCN well enough to fix the 4 shader engine / 64 CU / 64 ROP limits, optimizing for higher clock speeds is about all they can actually do to increase performance at this point. I think it's quite plausible that, for Navi, 1.8 GHz is a "normal" clock speed (roughly on par with 1.4 GHz for Vega 20) and doesn't require heroic levels of power to maintain. Who knows, maybe they'll even stop factory-overvolting the piss out of all their GPUs - but that's probably too much to hope for.

 

[JDG1980]

I have no real interest in console gaming, but what we know so far indicates that the PS5 is going to be a lot of computing power on both the CPU and GPU sides in a small and moderately priced package (and with a SSD!) Since it will be essentially a x86 PC at its heart, I wonder if someone will figure out a way to install Windows on it to use as a normal computer. The price/perf would be hard to beat if that could be done.

 

[Shivansps]

I have no real interest in console gaming, but what we know so far indicates that the PS5 is going to be a lot of computing power on both the CPU and GPU sides in a small and moderately priced package (and with a SSD!) Since it will be essentially a x86 PC at its heart, I wonder if someone will figure out a way to install Windows on it to use as a normal computer. The price/perf would be hard to beat if that could be done.

As i said, what we should do is ask AMD to provide to the consumers something like that, instead of that Intel-style RR refresh, not placing hopes in that someone, someday to find a way to hack the PS5.

 

[moinmoin]

As i said, what we should do is ask AMD to provide to the consumers something like that, instead of that Intel-style RR refresh, not placing hopes in that someone, someday to find a way to hack the PS5.

You are essentially asking for a new platform considering the 2400G APU is already hitting the memory bandwidth limit of AM4. A new platform just to support a beefier APU that will still nevertheless be beaten by most dedicated CPU + dedicated GPU combos on AM4 is lacking the audience to make that financially feasible. The next significantly improved APU will be possible once DDR5 is being used.

the Chinese RTG development team

Didn't know RTG has a Chinese development team. Any more info on that?

 

[Shivansps]

You are essentially asking for a new platform considering the 2400G APU is already hitting the memory bandwidth limit of AM4. A new platform just to support a beefier APU that will still nevertheless be beaten by most dedicated CPU + dedicated GPU combos on AM4 is lacking the audience to make that financially feasible. The next significantly improved APU will be possible once DDR5 is being used.

Never said it has to be AM4 I undertand it cant be done on DDR4, but release it to the embedded market and you can be sure that is going to sell.

 

[krumme]

Im not against high volume pricing, im pissed we are not going to get anything like that APU.



I belived that for the PS4 SoC because AMD was getting absolutely nothing anywhere, now im not so sure.

Amd not making money on ps4 was idiotic arguments originated by the same people that said ps4 was never going to amd.
And it lived on in the press and probably still do.
The entire idea is so stupid from an economic perspective I simply will not give arguments against it as children in kindergarten aught to grasp it by themselves.
For some reason amd is still here. Bulldozer must have been a gigantic success.
In some way it's understandable people dont know what marginal cost is but profit seems like a pretty simple concept to me.

 

[Arkaign]

Never said it has to be AM4 I undertand it cant be done on DDR4, but release it to the embedded market and you can be sure that is going to sell.

It would be a pretty exciting product.

If AMD could get a partner set put together to get ~16GB of GDDR6 or a nice HBM3 stack, put it together on an itx and/or mATX board, and I think it would be a compelling option. Maybe $349? $399? Save money by not having DDR4 slots/traces, no PCIe x16 slot, just @ couple M.2 X4 4.0 slots, a couple SATA 6gbps connections perhaps, some USB 3+C on the back, HDMI 2.x and Displayport, lan and wifi, and you have an awesome little product. I mean it would have to be a soldered-on APU to be practical, as the extreme memory width would make for an insanely huge pin count otherwise, but I'd be excited to see it.

IIRC there is an oddball APU like this made by a Chinese company, Linus looked at it, but it sadly was a bit wonky and very ram starved. An official AMD release in partnership with say Sapphire, Asus, ASRock, or whatever would be rad.

 

[killster1]

Well, because of several reasons. 1) I already have the 480GB-class SATA SSDs, and I'm paying for most of this PC for my friend. 2) NVMe SSDs for Steam game storage are, IMHO, a waste, unless you have money to burn (or "invest" in a 660p, which is sadly QLC), and 3) The primary PCI-E x16 slot is hosed on that board, and I never tested the primary PCI-E NVMe socket, it's possible that it doesn't work either, while I know the SATA ports still work OK.

If my friend had money for a PC, and was willing to pay "full rate" for parts, then sure, I'd put in an EX920 or something,, or maybe a WD Blue NVMe SSD. But I'm the one footing the bill for most of this for him.

Oh, and as far as benchmarks go, aside from any sort of RAM-cache benchmarks (which Samsung is famous for pushing), an NVMe SSD is barely 3x, maybe in extreme circumstances, 4x faster than SATA. That may change with PCI-E 4.0's introduction. But that's where it stands today. And 4KQD1 performance, is barely 50% better between a "good" NVMe and a "good" SATA SSD, and that benchmark most closely tracks with daily "seat of the pants" feel for SSDs.

IOW, the user wouldn't "feel" even 2x faster with an NVMe SSD, except for benchmarks, and possibly boot-up times.


Edit: Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of NVMe SSDs, they do "feel" a little bit faster to me, in daily usage, but I certainly don't notice that things are "10x faster". Hardly. And until very recently, they carried a fairly significant price premium (about 2x the cost of a "good" SATA SSD). The no additional cables is nice, though.

Long speech but really its cuz u bought to many SATA ssd hehh.. I can feel the diff between drives but I guess I actually use my pc for more than web browsing... i even started using nvme in my external drives as well. The prices seem like the same to me too..

 

[DrMrLordX]

while we get a Intel-like refresh of RR.

Context is everything. PS5 launches in 2020 when AMD will ship Renoir on PCs. Don't compare the PS5 to Picasso.

I wonder if someone will figure out a way to install Windows on it to use as a normal computer. The price/perf would be hard to beat if that could be done.

Linux seems more likely. The cache and RAM situation may not be favorable for general computing. Since it has Navi at its heart, it may not be all that good at GPGPU either (compared to, say, Radeon VII in a PC).

 

[escrow4]

I have switched to consoles exclusively for gaming, couldn't care less about extra tessellated titties. Had Ti's and Titans; got over them. Never mind all those PS exclusives - Days Gone is coming next week - say. Thing is at the old PS4 $399 launch price 1TB of flash storage plus 16GB of RAM would eat close to half of that alone, plus the SoC and all the other bits would blow out that price.

And for all the talk about Jaguar being a dog back in 2014 there were way fewer choices at that price point taking into account thermals. It's now 2019 and the SoC has acquitted itself well - all those exclusives show what you can squeeze out of a dedicated system. What I would like would be a small, tiny (smaller than Super Slim) box with a controller that has an amplifier for headphones - developers can work with whatever hardware Sony cranks out.

 

[Timorous]

This is assuming that clock speeds on Navi are similar to those on Vega. However, RTG seems to have identified this as a weakness of the architecture and has steadily improved clock speeds the past few iterations - Polaris tops out higher than 28nm GCN, and Vega goes considerably higher than Polaris (and clocks even higher on 7nm Vega 20 than on 14nm Vega 10). Since there's apparently no one in the Chinese RTG development team that understands GCN well enough to fix the 4 shader engine / 64 CU / 64 ROP limits, optimizing for higher clock speeds is about all they can actually do to increase performance at this point. I think it's quite plausible that, for Navi, 1.8 GHz is a "normal" clock speed (roughly on par with 1.4 GHz for Vega 20) and doesn't require heroic levels of power to maintain. Who knows, maybe they'll even stop factory-overvolting the piss out of all their GPUs - but that's probably too much to hope for.

Hawaii/Tonga to Polaris was mainly clock gains through node improvement and even then it underperformed imo. Personally I think Polaris should have has RX590 perf at 150W in the RX480.

There were not great clockspeed gains from Tahiti to Hawaii to Tonga to Fiji.

 

[alcoholbob]

This is definitely true, though I think there are going to be good reasons for this to change.

At 8C/16T, 3Ghz may be quite a bit of TDP (in terms of the overall budget at 7nm in a smallish console box). In isolation, obviously it would have plenty of room to do so even without exotic cooling such as in the X1X.

However, they're also seemingly cramming a 14.2TF Navi custom GPU into the APU, and wanting that to be clocked as highly as possible in contrast to the CPU portion, as that's by far what will make it impressive visually, while even at ~2Ghz, a Ryzen2 is an absolutely monumental improvement over Jag.

Finally, in terms of what has come before :

PS2/OG Xbox/GC/Wii, were all far too old and low power to worry about power/heat.

PS3 had Cell+RSX, and ~2005-era didn't have much in the way of power modes really, besides, the 8 cell 'cores' were also frequently used as extra graphics compute (eg; with Naughty Dog titles most notably). So no real need or ease of implementation for power states here.

X360 had a similar situation with PS3, gen7 you pretty much wanted your max CPU anyway, so no power modes.

PS4/X1, now we're talking a gen where it could have come in handy. Well that is, if they hadn't gone with the ultimate potato processor. Even maxed out at 1.6 (PS4), 1.75 (X1), 1.83 (X1S), 2.1 (Pro), or 2.3 (X1X), there was never really room to give up any CPU performance. They were essentially 8-Core netbook ultra low power processors, designed to fit into little tiny mobiles and tablets, and the potential savings would be nominal if any, at the cost of going from atrocious performance to completely unacceptable performance.

Now with Ryzen2 sharing space with a sizable Navi portion, you're talking a full fat desktop CPU that calculates out to a pretty reasonable performance level, and with a bit of extra power draw at higher clocks. Of course we also know that game code often gets into situations where one or two cores are extremely loaded, while others are nearly idling. Or, you have some background OS/friends list/minor tasks that don't need full performance from a core/thread.

I'm not saying 100% that it will have modular power states such as per core turbo/dynamic clocks, but it would honestly surprise me if it didn't, for two reasons :

It would allow for quieter/cooler/more efficient use, thus also being more reliable with less constant full clock heat.

It would allow for more effective use of a given TDP. Eg; 4 threads @ 3.4Ghz, 8 threads @ 2.2Ghz, 4 threads at 1.4Ghz, in a given example where draw/need was strongest and weakest. As long as the thermal design is capable of running all 8C at some reasonable max if absolutely necessary (albeit possibly with some extra fan noise), I think this is a good way of setting it up.

Just my thoughts, YMMV 🙂

14 TF GPU sounds beastly--faster than 2080 Ti!--until you realize we're talking about AMD here, in reality you are probably looking at Vega 64/GTX 1070 Ti gaming performance, which is pretty much what was expected all along, i.e., isn't enough for anything more than 4K30 in general and will have to go down to 1440p to hit 60+fps most of the time.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Never mind all those PS exclusives - Days Gone is coming next week - say.

I agree about the exclusives. I'd have been very interested if Horizon Zero Dawn was on PC. But no its on Playstation. I wasn't going to get a PS just for one game. Plus I'm comfortable with mouse/keyboard. And I don't really play games nowadays.

i.e., isn't enough for anything more than 4K30 in general and will have to go down to 1440p to hit 60+fps most of the time.

Consoles are different. Developers have one system to work on, and it doesn't change for years. It's amazing what you can squeeze out of the platform.

Unlike on PC where GPU manufacturers have to essentially guess on and make the best general purpose GPU of 3-4 years into the future.

 

[Olikan]

i.e., isn't enough for anything more than 4K30 in general and will have to go down to 1440p to hit 60+fps most of the time.

PS4 pro already reach 4k30 (not every game to), few titles even reach 60fps

 

[Arkaign]

PS4 pro already reach 4k30 (not every game to), few titles even reach 60fps

True. And X1X is usually 1800p-2160p, some titles 30fps, some 60.

That's at 6TF GCN, with a 2.3Ghz joke of a CPU. Given the graphics and details of the games @ 60fps, it seems evident that for the X1 (and PS4) that the larger bottleneck by far was the processor. At 14TF with improved efficiencies, the GPU side for 4k/60 is more than taken care of even with additional details (Pro/X1X usually are around medium details on PC terms). A Ryzen2 @ 3Ghz would represent an absolutely stunning increase in CPU power.

The Jag is trash. It always was. It really put serious limitations on open world or more complex AI for 8th gen. It makes the more impressive first party titles even more impressive when you consider that the Jag is worse than mediocre cell phone CPUs.

I remember the comparison with Jag benchmarks, and it worked out to be a bit less than half the speed per core per clock to the 512k cache per core Conroe pentiums. Extrapolating this, this means that it's slower than Northwood Pentium 4 per core.

Navigating all of the comparisons to Ryzen2 and what is reasonably expected for performance, the PS5 CPU should be well more than 20 times faster than the Jag, and often more than that. This should dramatically uncap possibilities with gaming design and scale, especially in dense open world designs.

 

[alcoholbob]

PS4 pro already reach 4k30 (not every game to), few titles even reach 60fps

I think people are more interested in 4K performance in AAA games though, yeah you can hit 4K60 with indie games but that's a low bar. Also improvements in lighting and tessellation to make PS5 stand out will eat alot into the GPU budget.

 

[NTMBK]

I think people are more interested in 4K performance in AAA games though, yeah you can hit 4K60 with indie games but that's a low bar. Also improvements in lighting and tessellation to make PS5 stand out will eat alot into the GPU budget.

Honestly, I really hope that it's not the graphics that will sell the PS5. I want games sold on their radical new designs enabled by the massively more powerful CPU and massively faster storage for streaming data.

PS4 has been great, but most of the popular games are just reheats of PS3-era design with shinier graphics. The jump in RAM enabled bigger worlds, but the crap CPUs limited what you could put in those worlds.

 

[Trumpstyle]

PS5 specs, 8core Zen2 clocked at 3,2ghz, Navi gpu with 36CU clocked at 1,8ghz giving 8,3TF, 12GB gddr6 Vram and 1TB ssd. Fall 2020 $400

Is this possible?

 

[TheELF]

PS5 specs, 8core Zen2 clocked at 3,2ghz, Navi gpu with 36CU clocked at 1,8ghz giving 8,3TF, 12GB gddr6 Vram and 1TB ssd. Fall 2020 $400

Is this possible?

If it's two custom 3300U or similar chips (the equivalent with navi graphics) for a total of 8 cores then yes,it would just be an PS4 updated to ZEN cores even sharing the same core topology so devs won't have to adopt to anything new.
The Tb ssd might be optional for different versions I doubt they fit it into the $400 one.

 

[darkswordsman17]

PS5 specs, 8core Zen2 clocked at 3,2ghz, Navi gpu with 36CU clocked at 1,8ghz giving 8,3TF, 12GB gddr6 Vram and 1TB ssd. Fall 2020 $400

Is this possible?

Its possible and in fact I'd say conservative in most aspects. I think it'll probably be around the 12.5TF range (as ~14-15TF seems to be roughly what Navi seems to be hinted at offering in dGPU - its allegedly Vega 64 level+~15%, which would be 12.65+~1.85 and the console will clock lower). Clock speeds of the CPU I bet can go higher (with it being up to the developer, where they might be able to turbo single core over 4.0GHz; all core that is probably in line with what I'd expect for sustained load though). GPU clock, I'd wager will be lower than that (it'd still be a lot higher than console GPUs have gone, the PS4 Pro isn't even 1GHz and I think the One X is like 1.1-1.2GHz), and probably more in the 1.5-1.6GHz range, unless Navi is strongly optimized for clock speeds (say the dGPU version hits 2.0GHz, I'd guess the console tops at ~1.8GHz with sustained ).

I also would strongly doubt 1TB SSD. They are likely using embedded NAND where they'll load most or all of a game (so that load times and swapping textures/assets out is very fast). I'd guess it'll have 64-128GB NAND onboard, with the system memory being the buffer (hence the "faster than any PC SSD talk that Sony has stated). But its a big enough feature that I think they won't segment it (so that all games target the same as they seem to view it as integral to improving gameplay), and speedy 1TB SSDs are too expensive for a console. 128GB would be 1/10th the cost, and would be enough to hold most entire games - even the really large ones, right now, with space to grow some as well. Now that they will have more powerful CPUs and probably fixed function decoder/encoder hardware for media like video and images, they might do more compression and use high efficiency compression formats, and go for less NAND to save costs some. I think 64GB would be stretching it though, so maybe ~96/100GB.

I'd guess 16GB of GDDR6 memory.

I also have a hunch it'll be $499, but that might be for a premium one that includes a HDD and optical drive with a base model that is digital (with an empty HDD bay) for $399 offered a bit later once production outstrips demand, and to make it seem like a price drop.

 

[TheGiant]

the PS5 CPU should be well more than 20 times faster than the Jag, and often more than that. This should dramatically uncap possibilities with gaming design and scale, especially in dense open world designs.

this also brings to the table possibilities for PC gaming, as most of the games are developed for consoles primarily as current console CPUs are hand calculators comparing to latest cores or ryzens

 

[Shlong]

If it's two custom 3300U or similar chips (the equivalent with navi graphics) for a total of 8 cores then yes,it would just be an PS4 updated to ZEN cores even sharing the same core topology so devs won't have to adopt to anything new.
The Tb ssd might be optional for different versions I doubt they fit it into the $400 one.

TB SSD's are pretty cheap now. Recently replaced a 5400rpm HD in my PS4 with a TB SSD that was on sale for $89. What a huge difference in load times.

 

[TheELF]

TB SSD's are pretty cheap now. Recently replaced a 5400rpm HD in my PS4 with a TB SSD that was on sale for $89. What a huge difference in load times.

Yeah but that would pretty much be one quarter of the total cost...