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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Hot Chips: Xbone Silicon (5b transistors, 363mm2, 8GB Flash, 1.31TFlops, 204GB/s peak BW)

Adinnieken said:

The Hot Chips conference will show enough to prove that Sony have lied.

That's what make his post innacurate... HotChips showed the Sony didn't lied (well the leaks are not from Sony insiders... the specs leaks come from a MS insiders).

And MS boosted the GPU from 800Mhz to 853Mhz weeks ago... 1.31TFLOPS.



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Seems like its slightly faster than advertised. Looks like PS4 and XB0 will truly be neck and neck in most respects, with each having a few flavors and variants.

I am kind of surprised, though, they are using a 28nm architecture for the GPU. Given that AMDs 20nm revision is in October, I would have assumed it'd ship along a similar timeframe.. Guess not.

Guess this means my 7950s aren't gonna go out of style any time soon.



Back from the dead, I'm afraid.

Speaking at the Hot Chips engineering conference at Stanford University, Microsoft chip architect John Sell said the Xbox One’s main processor is a gargantuan beast, co-designed with Advanced Micro Devices and manufactured by contract chip manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The chip covers an area of 363 square millimeters and is built in a 28-nanometer state-of-the-art manufacturing process. It has 5 billion basic components, known as transistors, on a single chip that combines a microprocessor, graphics processor, and 47 megabytes of memory.

As one member of the audience remarked, that mean it’s a big chip. Such chips are hard to manufacture, as any small defect can render a chip inoperable. And the larger a chip, the more prone it is to small defects.

To deal with that, Sell said Microsoft designed in redundancies into the chip where it could, so that if one section was inoperable, it doesn’t kill the whole chip. Nevertheless, it means that it won’t be easy to churn out millions of such chips.

To make the chip more power efficient, Microsoft designed small islands and gates within the chip that could switch off certain areas so the overall chip consumes less power. Such techniques are standard in big chip projects these days, and they mean that only the parts of a chip that are being used are drawing power.

The central processing unit (CPU) has eight 64-bit Jaguar cores designed by AMD.

The graphics section of the main processor has 15 special processors that can handle things like graphics or physics processing. Data highways can transfer bits at a rate of 200 gigabytes per second or more across different parts of the chip. The audio subsystem has two dedicated vector cores.

Microsoft disclosed some details, but left many important pieces out. Evidently, Microsoft doesn’t want to tell all of its competitors about how well designed its system is.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/26/microsoft-disclosed-details-for-the-main-processor-and-the-kinect-image-processor-in-the-xbox-one-video-game-console-today-at-a-chip-design-conference-those-details-are-critical-for-the-kind-of-expe/



mrstickball said:
Seems like its slightly faster than advertised. Looks like PS4 and XB0 will truly be neck and neck in most respects, with each having a few flavors and variants.

I am kind of surprised, though, they are using a 28nm architecture for the GPU. Given that AMDs 20nm revision is in October, I would have assumed it'd ship along a similar timeframe.. Guess not.

Guess this means my 7950s aren't gonna go out of style any time soon.

PS4: 1.84 Tflops with RAM that has more bandwidth.

Xbox One: 1.31TFlops with RAM that has less bandwidth.

That is not neck in neck. You could fit two X360s in that gap.



"The graphics section of the main processor has 15 special processors "

15???

I thought the leaks showed 12 process unities. Or is he talking about the 15 co-processors?



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Dark_Feanor said:
"The graphics section of the main processor has 15 special processors "

15???

I thought the leaks showed 12 process unities. Or is he talking about the 15 co-processors?

The slides shows many processors...

 Now we need to know what MS counts to get 15... there are more than 15.



Just the Audio have four or five processors plus all the DMEs (Data Move).



mrstickball said:
Seems like its slightly faster than advertised. Looks like PS4 and XB0 will truly be neck and neck in most respects, with each having a few flavors and variants.

I am kind of surprised, though, they are using a 28nm architecture for the GPU. Given that AMDs 20nm revision is in October, I would have assumed it'd ship along a similar timeframe.. Guess not.

Guess this means my 7950s aren't gonna go out of style any time soon.


?

There will be no 20nm chips this year in any way shape or form, the new AMD and Nvidia GPU's will still be 28nm's.

And even if 20nm did ship this year the yield would be so low that there would be no way for Microsoft to ship even at current WiiU shipping levels.



hmmm interesting. i have no idea what it means. lol



kumagawa said:
mrstickball said:
Seems like its slightly faster than advertised. Looks like PS4 and XB0 will truly be neck and neck in most respects, with each having a few flavors and variants.

I am kind of surprised, though, they are using a 28nm architecture for the GPU. Given that AMDs 20nm revision is in October, I would have assumed it'd ship along a similar timeframe.. Guess not.

Guess this means my 7950s aren't gonna go out of style any time soon.


?

There will be no 20nm chips this year in any way shape or form, the new AMD and Nvidia GPU's will still be 28nm's.

And even if 20nm did ship this year the yield would be so low that there would be no way for Microsoft to ship even at current WiiU shipping levels.

Yep...this is correct.

It's a case of AMD can't (yet) and Nvidia won't since no one is forcing them to do it... Nvidia Maxwell in 2014 will be the first to go 20 nm.