PS5: Leaked Design And Technology [RUMOUR]

[Pemalite]

Areaz32 said:

Pemalite said:

Not anymore they don't. They use PC derived hardware with maybe a couple of extra tricks sprinkled on.

You cannot buy an APU with the PS4 CPU + PS4 GPU.

You don't need to?

Areaz32 said:

Just because the different chips on the APU die are derived from chips sold on discrete desktop hardware, doesn't mean it isn't highly customized and extremely optimized.

It is not "Highly customized".
There is no secret sauce.
There is no capabilities of the PS4 SOC that cannot be done on PC.
The PS4 SOC isn't punching significantly above it's weight from comparable PC hardware.

Areaz32 said:

The mere reality of the APU design in the PS4 makes it able to be optimized way more than most other computer hardware out there. The unified memory is an example.

Nah.
PC has unified memory.
The PC has APU's which exceed the base Playstation 4. I.E. Ryzen 5 Pro 2400G.

It's nothing special.

Intrinsic said:

1. I am aware that they won't be buying hardware off the shelf. But like you have already said these consoles are as close to off the shelf hardware as consoles have ever been. Simply looking at whts out there wll paint a clearly good picture of what can or will be possible. A 6 core 12 thread cpu sounds more like it though.

Difference is... There is no component consolidation or bulk buying to reduce price.

Intrinsic said:

I think they will go with the M.2 "interface". They will definately still be using SATA based SSDs but over an NvME M.2 interface. Its just future proofing and it takes up less space. No point putting a 2.5 SSD drive in there cause they cost the same as the sata basedm.2 drives. I think a mechanical drive will be prohibitively slow for the next gen consoles. Too much of a bottleneck to build into hardware that could very well be around till 2027. And by 2020 the can probably get SATA based M.2 drives of about 1TB fr under $40.

1. A mechanical drive just doesn,t make any sense with the direction the entire industry is going right now. 

Yeah. But consoles don't care about industry direction.
They care about price/performance.

Mechanical drives still have the advantage in that regard, especially as game sizes continue to blow out... Forcing the requirement of multi-terabyte storage solutions.
Mechanical disks are also sufficient enough from a performance perspective as well for asset streaming into DRAM, provided they are sustained reads.

Keep in mind... Even by PC standards even the Xbox One X is using a slow mechanical disk.

There is a shift to QLC NAND at the moment which will apply cost pressures to mechanical disks... However. They are lacking in the performance department... And thus require an ample amount of DRAM and SLC NAND to fix the performance issue QLC NAND inherently brings.

EricHiggin said:

Pemalite said: 

7nm brings with it a slew of advantages in regards to power consumption and heat production.

Correct, depending on how many TF it ends up at overall. The higher the clocks the lower the CU count most likely, if it's going to fit in launch PS4 sized shell for cheap. If it can run at 1500MHz and hit around 10TF, that'll be pretty impressive.

That's just it. It's a balancing act between CU counts and clockrate... Get the right balance and you get an optimal performance/power consumption/die space target.

It's not overtly difficult to best even the Xbox One right now with mid-range hardware... 7nm should be able to increase that gap substantially.

Hopefully the hardware is more impressive than a 3640@1500mhz chip... Especially if we want to look at Ray Tracing which is inherently a compute limited issue.

EricHiggin said:

'm not, since it will probably be semi custom. 7nm apparently is still fairly expensive compared to 14nm, but I guess that could change between now and mid 2019. A custom 6 core CPU/APU would also mean more dies per wafer, so that would also save some on cost to manufacture. Still doesn't seem like it'll be cheap, or near as cheap as Jaguar would have been.

Newer fabrication processes are always more expensive than the older ones. Up to a point.
The larger the chip is, the more expensive it becomes... And the more sense it becomes to fabricate it at a smaller process.

However... AMD's approach is to de-integrate parts of the chip that doesn't scale downwards to smaller geometry's anyway and get cost savings that way, might be something that next-gen takes on.

Zen itself though is actually a very tiny tiny core. We are looking at 44mm2 for a quad core Ryzen 1 CPU @14nm. Or 11mm2 per core.
It's not as small as Jaguar though which is 3.1mm2 per core @ 28nm... But you also don't need 8 CPU cores+extra ARM cores (PS4 only) as it has more available CPU time to handle everything.

Jaguar was cheap, but also extremely nasty.

Ryzen on 7nm will be more tenable for next gen though from a costing point... Plus the consoles can consolidate parts of the chip (I.E. Sharing L2/L3 caches, I/O etc') between the GPU and CPU cores anyway.

EricHiggin said:

20 available to devs, 24 overall. My bad. I would think PS would follow the XB1 8GB to XB1X 12GB RAM approach (minus DDR/eSRAM) instead of PS4 to Pro when it comes to next gen. That would more easily allow the 16GB for devs at launch, then maybe 24GB for devs mid gen.

Xbox One X is a "premium" consoles with a higher price tag to match... Thus it could afford the wider memory bus in conjunction with more PCB traces and memory chips.
For a base console which is meant to drop to low price points, I just don't see anything more than 16GB being feasible.