| Squilliam said: I cannot comment on the fill rates, however it is likely that the consoles will use commodity memory standard such as GDDR5. Modern graphics cards on a 256 bit bus are expected to realise about 160GB per second bandwidth, as modern GPUs aren't bandwidth contstrained assuming this remains the standard or something similar, 80GB-120GB per second would be a decent estimate on a 128bit bus and would more than satisfy the requirements of a console of that era. The problem is, you're making the assumption that the next generation consoles would have the same CPU + GPU architecture. They could instead use either a unified design or a CPU/GPU multichip module and stitch them together through a single unified bus. |
Yes, the semiconductor industry is heading in the direction you described in order to maintain or beat the pace of performance gain of yesteryears. AMD is working on such a chip. Intel has the Lanrabee coming out 2009, but this is not a unified chip yet. If Moor's law hold true until 2012, every two years chip density double, die size of 2005 will hold 8 times the chip density. Using the 360 CPU (Xeon) for reference, we are looking at the possibility of fitting 8 Xeon (3x8 = 24 cores total) on the same die size. So certainly, CPU and GPU on one chip is quite a possibility for next gen consoles.
If this single chip design is used, bandwidth should not be an issue as you said.
Some had said that they think MS and Sony will use the Nintendo approach and the next gen will be around 4 times the power. I think we should wish for much more power. Current gen PC which is already more than twice the power of current consoles, can not even run Crysis at more than 40f/s @ max setting. And Crysis while a very beautiful game, there are still a million thing that can be done to improve the game in areas such as physics, graphics, AI.
