Xbox One X (Scorpio) SoC Discussion

[dogen1]

So, 66% GPU use at 4k with 2x MSAA, puts it in theory around 90fps if there was no cap, ignoring any potential CPU(or other) bottleneck. And 88% utilization at ultra settings, not only puts it above the 980 ti which gets 46 fps(correct me if any updates changed this!).

It also puts CPU performance higher than first gen bulldozer and around piledriver or a haswell i3. At least in this game.

 

[SlowSpyder]

It took a long time, but I think we're finally seeing "Fusion" really move towards what AMD envisioned way back then.

 

[thepaleobiker]

Any chance these "cheap" 8 core x86 CPU will find its way out into the consumer wilderness? Did the Jaguar cores ever leave the Xbox/PS4 platform?

 

[dogen1]

Any chance these "cheap" 8 core x86 CPU will find its way out into the consumer wilderness? Did the Jaguar cores ever leave the Xbox/PS4 platform?

No idea, but it would make for some extremely interesting console vs pc tests.

 

[mohit9206]

I'm not denying those changes will help the performance, but, you know, all consoles are capable of 60fps locked games. It´s just that the developers always continue pushing the hardware more until they don´t. Same will happen with Scorpio unless Microsoft really requires 60fps locked as a validation requirement.

Yes i agree with this. Its not going to be 60 fps for all games unless there is a compulsory requirement by Microsoft. Some games will be 1080p with 60fps,some will be 4k with 30fps and some will be 4k at 60fps.

 

[escrow4]

I'm sure everyone agrees that anything hardware that enables deeper, richer, longer and more in depth games is a good thing . . . . especially as consoles have so far been the limiting factor.

 

[Bouowmx]

Any chance these "cheap" 8 core x86 CPU will find its way out into the consumer wilderness? Did the Jaguar cores ever leave the Xbox/PS4 platform?

AMD Kabini for socket AM1, featuring 2-4 Jaguar cores and integrated GPU with 128 GCN shaders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...ssors#.22Kabini.22_.282014.2C_28_nm.2C_SoC.29

 

[nathanddrews]

Any chance these "cheap" 8 core x86 CPU will find its way out into the consumer wilderness? Did the Jaguar cores ever leave the Xbox/PS4 platform?

It's not Jaguar, but right now you can't get much cheaper than the 8320E if you want octacore.

 

[Sweepr]

To cut a long story short, Scorpio supports AMD's FreeSync - and the upcoming variable refresh rate support baked into the next-gen HDMI 2.1 spec.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-supports-freesync-and-hdmi-vrr

 

[Sweepr]

Scorpio dev kit gets the full GPU - 44 CUs @ 1.172 GHz (6.6 TFLOPs) + 24GB GDDR5 + 1TB SSD

The GPU in question sports 40 customized compute units at 1172 Mhz, but the Scorpio dev kits will actually ship with a bit more power -- 44 CUs, rather than 40.

“At a high level, it's much easier for a game developer to come in higher and tune down, than come in lower and tune up. Or nail it. That just rarely happens,” said Gammill, by way of explaining why the Scorpio dev kit is a bit beefier than its retail counterpart. “Our overarching design principle was to make it easy for devs to hit our goals: 4K, 4K textures, rocksteady framerates, HDR, wide color gamut, and spatial audio.”

What’s more interesting about the Scorpio console is that, according to Microsoft, it’s designed to incorporate basic, oft-used DirectX12 draw calls into the GPU command processor itself, potentially freeing up some processing power for devs.

“It's the first time I'm aware of us ever doing something like this,” Gammill said. “We actually pulled some of the DX12 runtime components directly into the hardware. So basically, these high-frequency DX12 draw calls you'd normally call [to output a frame, for example] which would take up a lot of GPU and CPU cycles, now that that's baked into the system itself, it makes the system significantly more efficient.”

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/..._Project_Scorpio_and_its_brandnew_dev_kit.php

 

[imported_bman]

From looking at the pictures of the dev kit and the motherboard picture (HDMI port indentations) it is apparent that the motherboard will be mounted downfacing, blower fan be on the bottom of unit. Also assuming that dev kit is close to the final design of the Scorpio it looks like MS has not made the HDD easily swapable, though the the picture is pretty low res so there might still be an opening on the left hand side.

 

[Roland00Address]

Question not for the new Xbox Scorpio, but lets pretend Microsoft were releasing another new xbox one year later. How hard would it be for Microsoft to do 8 Ryzen Cores and then 8 Jaguar Cores for backwards compatibility if they really cared about backwards compatibility and not emulation? I ask for now a days surely the 8 Jaguar Cores plus l2 cache must be a tiny part of the soc die.

 

[imported_bman]

Why bother with emulation when Ryzen could just run the code natively with little effort. MS did a pile of work with virtualization to avoid compatibility issues.

 

[Elixer]

Question not for the new Xbox Scorpio, but lets pretend Microsoft were releasing another new xbox one year later. How hard would it be for Microsoft to do 8 Ryzen Cores and then 8 Jaguar Cores for backwards compatibility if they really cared about backwards compatibility and not emulation? I ask for now a days surely the 8 Jaguar Cores plus l2 cache must be a tiny part of the soc die.

It wouldn't be that difficult, it would just be priced way too high for it to make sense to MS.

 

[SpaceBeer]

But why new cores break compatibility? I mean, we can use old software on new CPUs without issues, what's the difference in consoles if both are x86?

 

[sm625]

But why new cores break compatibility? I mean, we can use old software on new CPUs without issues, what's the difference in consoles if both are x86?

I'd be more worried about the lack of ESRAM breaking compatibility. The overall bandwidth on scorpio is clearly better but if games are optimized to use that low latency ESRAM then it could cause issues.

 

[dogen1]

I'd be more worried about the lack of ESRAM breaking compatibility. The overall bandwidth on scorpio is clearly better but if games are optimized to use that low latency ESRAM then it could cause issues.

Apparently it's not a big problem. Scorpio's supposed to play every XB1 game fine.

 

[2is]

Question not for the new Xbox Scorpio, but lets pretend Microsoft were releasing another new xbox one year later. How hard would it be for Microsoft to do 8 Ryzen Cores and then 8 Jaguar Cores for backwards compatibility if they really cared about backwards compatibility and not emulation? I ask for now a days surely the 8 Jaguar Cores plus l2 cache must be a tiny part of the soc die.

I'm no expert but I don't think emulation would be necessary at all. Ryzen can natively run all the instructions Jaguar runs, there would be no need for Jaguar cores at all. Problem with using Ryzen is there is no integrated GPU, at least not yet.

 

[Shivansps]

40CU@326gb/s that will dance circles around RX480... nince going AMD, good luck with consoles.

 

[rancherlee]

Apparently it's not a big problem. Scorpio's supposed to play every XB1 game fine.

The concern is developers won't take advantage of ESRAM on new games and performance will suffer on the XB1/XB1S because of it. Not a big deal for me since I'll probably get a Scorpio soon after release but I have a few gaming buddies that don't want to upgrade and they are worried performance will drop on future games even if they are "playable" on the old ones.

 

[NTMBK]

The concern is developers won't take advantage of ESRAM on new games and performance will suffer on the XB1/XB1S because of it. Not a big deal for me since I'll probably get a Scorpio soon after release but I have a few gaming buddies that don't want to upgrade and they are worried performance will drop on future games even if they are "playable" on the old ones.

At least they'll be getting the games. Without Scorpio, I suspect XBox One would be getting fewer future games anyway.

 

[CatMerc]

For anyone wondering why Microsoft kept using Jaguar:

 

[dogen1]

The concern is developers won't take advantage of ESRAM on new games and performance will suffer on the XB1/XB1S because of it. Not a big deal for me since I'll probably get a Scorpio soon after release but I have a few gaming buddies that don't want to upgrade and they are worried performance will drop on future games even if they are "playable" on the old ones.

Of course they'll still use it..

 

[Sweepr]

Worth a read:

Inside the Scorpio Engine: the processor architecture deep dive
www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-the-scorpio-engine-in-depth

 

[William Gaatjes]

But why new cores break compatibility? I mean, we can use old software on new CPUs without issues, what's the difference in consoles if both are x86?

With consoles with a fixed hardware setup( All same model consoles have in principle the same hardware) , the programming environment allows for more optimizations and tweaks that use the hardware to its fullest and circumvent any slow paths that might exist in the hardware.
With the pc and its various hardware options, it is much more difficult if not close to impossible to do that very same thing. That is why windows has a more abstract programming model. To hide all the different model gpus and cpus and amount of memory and types of memory. Even with DX12 and vulcan this is the case more or less but developers have more freedom.

With consoles this is not the case. What can happen, if you write a game which is low level (means close to the hardware with as little abstraction as possible) optimized for jaguar modules , you might run into issues when you use another core even if it is x86 64bit as well.

The point is that consoles get close to high end pc performance by doing a lot of low level programming that is dependent on exact hardware behavior and timing constraints of that same hardware. If the hardware changes slightly, the program might not run that well and cause hiccups or even crashes. Sometimes, game engine programmers discover certain undocumented behavior of the hardware that can be used to speed up game code.
If this is used, it is certain, the game will not run well on an emulator or different hardware with for example cpu instruction architecture compatibility but the same principle applies to all the hardware, the gpu and the memory controller and the logic that connects it all together.
In the old days with for example the Amiga, this was very normal. That is why even now, an amiga emulator or some game console emulator on a high end pc may not run all those (Amiga) games properly.


edit:
With abstraction i mean that the hardware details are hidden and a more general programming interface(API) is used. This high level API then translates all your wishes to commands and data that the underlying hardware can understand. With different hardware, the high level API hides the details of all the hardware. Of course, this means a slow down because you have to prepare your data to a common format used by the API and the API then translates it again to data and commands that the hardware understands. Because of this generalization and creating a common format, not always maximum performance can be reached for the sake of being able to use many different kinds of hardware.
The API takes care of that. DirectX, vulcan, opengl and opengl ES are for example such API (Application programming Interface).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface.

If you are interested in how it all works , hop to the beyond3d forums, there is a consoles section that sometimes has very informative explanations about how it all works. Especially sebbbi is very open and extremely good in explaining it to people who are interested.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/