By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Squilliam on 28 November 2012
Edit Thread
HappySqurriel said:
Squilliam said:

A chip which is a little slower than the HD 7850 would deliver around 8* the GPU shader performance of the Xbox 360 and on a mature 28nm process that is pretty plausible. They can easily devote a large proportion of the power budget to the GPU because the CPU in the Xbox 360 was a dog in comparison to current designs in performance/W such as the jaguar cores from AMD which only use a few watts per core and deliver better performance. The rumoured inclusion of low power/high performance CPU cores and memory architectures (DDR4) means that they can devote more energy towards putting prettier pictures on the screen.

I doubt that one single 250-300mm^2 die in would break the bank in comparison to the dual similar sized dice the current generation consoles launched with and the use of generic technologies like DDR4 and Blu Ray ought to control costs further.


The Xenos is reported to have 240 GFLOPS of processing power, the Radeon HD 7850 is reported to have 1761.28 GFLOPS of processing power (7.388 times the Xenos) and consumes 130 Watts of electricity under load. To get the Radeon HD 7850 to a reasonable level of power consumption to release a 150 Watt console you would probably see its processing power reduced to 6 times that of the Xenos.

 

Having studied AMD's GPUs trying to predict the Wii U's chipset, the best options for a console at this point in time is their mobility line of GPUs (because their desktop GPUs run too hot). For Nintendo, the most likely similar GPUs are the Radeon 7950M, 7630M to 7690M, because they draw less than 25 Watts under load, have 480 stream processors, are manufactured using a 40nm process, and are designed using the Turks core; and these processors have between 450 GFLOPS and 700GFLOPS of processing power (two to three times the Xenos).

The top of the line GPU from AMD, with their best performance per watt, is the Radeon 7970M running at 75Watts and producing 2TFLOPS of processing power (roughly 8 times the Xenos and 3 to 4 times the likely Wii U GPU range). It is an expensive GPU but not (necessarily) too expensive for a console unless that system comes bundled with an expensive "controller" like the Wii U tablet or Kinect. Expecting much beyond that is not realistic because I doubt AMD can produce a more efficient GPU at this point in time, using (much) more electricity will result in a console which simply runs too hot, and the cost of the GPU would already be pushing the limits of what you could realistically expect Microsoft to spend.

A FLOP on one architecture Vec 4+1 (Xenos) is entirely different to another such as GCN. A new GPU architecture would likely also be significantly more efficient so if the new GPU has 8* the number of flops the realisable performance will be higher.

You can't just look at a laptop GPU which is configured differently and infer how a console's GPU would perform. A console GPU which is rumoured to use lower power memory and eSRAM will be different because a significant quantity of power consumption in modern chips is data moving out of the chip over data buses. Furthermore a console starting mass production in the middle of 2013 with a second generation 28nm GPU on a much more mature process ought to deliver 10-20% better performance per watt/area than current designs.

I don't think that the next generation systems will be bundled with expensive controllers, or at least they'll have cheap ones without them anyway. I believe that both Microsoft and Sony will give people 'options' of different ways to play games between standard controllers, Kinect/Move and tablets. $299/399 are both doable price points and this generation does show that fairly solid sales are achieveable between these two price points.



Tease.