| fatslob-:O said:
Dude the CPU's in the PS4 and xbone is 5 times faster in floating point workloads and I'm pretty sure jaguar is more similar bulldozer than phenom so it's no slouch in the integer performance department either. Oh and there are 4 modules I think which is completely different from a core. Each of those modules possess 2 128bit SIMD's. What do you mean by "blow" ? If anything core for core the jaguar's almost perform's twice as fast as the wii u does in terms of floating point operations. Yeah this convo is quite a bit off topic. |
The issue with Espresso, is that paired singles is something completely different than any other forms of SIMD (it's not even "real" SIMD), and porting heavy FP code from a 128-bit SIMD unit to a 32-bit x 2 Paired Singles isn't an easy operation. It's not like it can't do it, it just won't do it in the same way, nor at the same amount. And the fact that there's only 3 cores is a limiting factor. The amount of stuff it can do is limited, but it's no way a terrible architecture at all. It running several modern games using 32-bit x 2 paired singles is impressive. It's surprising that it was able to do that well in the matmul SIMD tests, something it shouldn't be able to do amazingly.
That core surprises people like this:
http://www.radgametools.com/bnkhist.htm
- Added Wii-U support for Bink 2 - play 30 Hz 1080p or 60 Hz 720p video! We didn't think this would be possible - the little non-SIMD CPU that could!
Something like Espresso, can decode Bink 2 @ 1080p/30 or 720p/60, which is a pure SIMD instruction, even though Espresso doesn't even have real SIMD. I'm pretty sure a more modern CPU with proper SIMD instructions would be able to do this normally, but Espresso being able to do it AT ALL is surprising. Who knows what sorts of things this thing would be able to do in the future.
No, 32-bit x 2 paired singles is not as good as having a true 128-bit SIMD, but that doesn't mean we won't be seeing amazing physics, just not at the same levels as PS4/X1. But calling it "weak" or "terrible" is an understatement. With respect to multi-hundred dollar CPUs, yes, it's a joke, all 8th generation console CPUs are terribly under-powered compared to even some lower-end CPUs on the market, and that's a shame. Core-for-core, Jaguar isn't going to do stuff that Espresso couldn't handle one way or another (it could do it, just not at the same level), and that won't make downports from next gen impossible, just difficult. Much better than trying to port from Xenon to Broadway though!
Anyway, Shin'en had better show something good for their next game, because talking "big" like that just has to be supported by actually doing something nice. Nano Assault looks okay, and it's cool that it runs with only the main CPU core, but it's not gonna impress many people. They had better use Tessellation well in their next game, not just for small things.
