drkohler said:
Michael-5 said:
Anyway, people are miking too much of a deal about RAM. Small RAM and a weak CPU were PS3 bottlenecks, and PS4 still has a weak CPU.
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A common misconception that assumes "simple programs". Let's look at a hypothetical game with a few worker threads and a few "other" threads, take the worst example, 8 threads. On a dual core cpu, you immediately see the problem, every thread gets less than 1/4 of a core. On a quad-core, hyperthreading processor, each thread would roughly get (a little less than) half of a core. Suddenly your super 3.5GHz quad core processor behaves like an 8 core 1.6GHz processor. To make a long story short, whether the 8core PS4NextBox processor is weak or strong entirely depends on how the game code is organized. If it is well organized (particularly no cache stalls between the two 4core groups in the rumoured Jaguar-type processors), then an 8core processors could perform better than quad-cores. If you program a tic-tac-toe-like game on the PS4nextBox, then indeed the processors will be weak, otherwise 8 cores can (but need not be) a real bonus.
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You do realize the PS4 CPU comes from a lineup of laptops, right?
Pemalite said:
drkohler said:
A common misconception that assumes "simple programs". Let's look at a hypothetical game with a few worker threads and a few "other" threads, take the worst example, 8 threads. On a dual core cpu, you immediately see the problem, every thread gets less than 1/4 of a core. On a quad-core, hyperthreading processor, each thread would roughly get (a little less than) half of a core. Suddenly your super 3.5GHz quad core processor behaves like an 8 core 1.6GHz processor. To make a long story short, whether the 8core PS4NextBox processor is weak or strong entirely depends on how the game code is organized. If it is well organized (particularly no cache stalls between the two 4core groups in the rumoured Jaguar-type processors), then an 8core processors could perform better than quad-cores. If you program a tic-tac-toe-like game on the PS4nextBox, then indeed the processors will be weak, otherwise 8 cores can (but need not be) a real bonus.
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That would be true if Sony didn't go with AMD Jaguar cores which have an inferior IPC compared to even a 7 year old Desktop PC processor, AMD hasn't even been able to compete in the high-end since the Athlon 64 days, they certainly haven't improved the situation since then, Jaguar is a low-powered part targeted at Netbooks and Laptops and tablets, it will never compete with a 100 watt TDP desktop processor, just like Cell.
Plus... When you add more cores to a processor, the scaling isn't linear, you get diminishing returns due to things like bandwidth constraints, cache misses etc'.
It's all well and good to play with numbers to put things into a positive light, but the issues surrounding performance scaling on processors with more than 4 cores have been known for many many many years.
So regardless of how the developers use the 8 core processor, it's still going to be weak, no magic cure for that I'm afraid and it looks like my Core i7 3930K @ 4.8ghz isn't going to get a good workout with console ports yet again.
As for Hyper-threading, it's not always the ideal method to extract more performance, in-fact sometimes it will do the opposite and decrease performance depending on the kind of work load placed upon it as each thread has to compete with resources on the same core.
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Ah you beat me to it. Good Job, well said.
