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Intrinsic on 05 January 2019
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Pemalite said:

And you are ignoring some other facts. - It's not as black and white as you portray.

Remember... That Microsoft ditched the ESRAM with the Xbox One X... On the Original Xbox One, the SoC was roughly the same size as the Playstation 4, but had 50% less CU's... All because of that SRAM.

The move from 16nm to 7nm though will be a big one as it's a massive shift in geometries, 16nm is based on 20nm remember.
Where the extra gains will come from will be successive refined nodes... I.E. 20nm became 16nm with Finfet, which became 12nm and so on. Plus the refinements of each advertised process... Like 16nm Low-Power. etc'.
Same thing will occur with 7nm, expect it to be rebadged/refined as 6nm and so on.

TSMC pegs the move from 16nm to 7nm as 70% decrease in chip size with a 60% decrease in power consumption.
Global Foundries pegs the move from 14nm to 7nm as 65% decrease in chip size with a 60% decrease in power consumption.

That will of course improve as the process matures.

Oh I am aware its not as clear cut as that. But I also know that the move t 7nm is more significant than the move to 16nm from 28nm. I aso know that with 7nm building an APU like I have described is possible. Especially if they are aiming t have a similarly sized APU in those consoles as we do now in the PS4pro/XB1X

 

Pemalite said: 

The Xbox One X is a "Premium" console not designed to hit low price points like the Xbox One or Xbox One S though.


I doubt we will get anything like those chips anyway. - The current whispers-along-the-grape-vine is that Navi will be a Polaris Replacement, essentially should bring Vega 64 performance to 150w TDP, perfect for the mid-range, perfect for consoles.

Expect 64 CU's (Or there-abouts), expect more conservative clocks to keep power consumption in check.

I strongly dont think the things that make the XB1X "premium" will be issues when looking at next gen hardware. First off, I dn't think the XB1X APU has anything to do with it costing more. It has a GPU with 4 more CUs than the PS4pro but the overall die size is very similar to the PS4pro APU. It using a Vapor chamber and 12GB RAM on a 384bit bus is why it costs more than a PS4pro.

I dont see them using a vapor chamber r even a 384 bit bus n next gen consoles. They just don't need to and would still be able to get performance from their components that dwarfs what we have with the Pro or the X. Eg using 12 GDDR6 chips on a 256 bit bus will still yield over 600GB/s of bandwidth or if using a 384bit bus will result in around 800GB/s. And assuming they are using the cheaper 14Gb/s/pin variant of the memory. 

While I am aware f some sort of supposed 64 CU limitation with regards to Polaris we don't really know if that limitation will carry through to navi so I don't think we can just put the ceiling at 64 CUs right now. 

Also the thing about conservative clocks can sound misleading. Even though you are right. Eg Say the CPU is based on an 8Core zen that ideally clocks up to 4GHz. Conservative clocks for consoles will probably bring that down to 3Ghz. Say the navi based GPU is designed to run at 1.8GHz - 2Ghz, console speeds will again be like say 1.2Ghz - 1.5hz. That is still a massive bump in performance when considering all the new components being used.

 

Pemalite said: 

There are ways to circumvent that... I.E. Smart data streaming like you alluded to.
For instance, during 7th gen, some games would send a burst packet of data into DRAM and then used a few CPU cycles to decompress and "unpack" that packet into the dozens of smaller files, that reduces disk access significantly.

Yes, and maybe those methods can be employed again next gen but I think they didn't use those methods this gen because of the weaker CPUs in the current gen consoles.

Last edited by Intrinsic - on 05 January 2019