walsufnir said:
Sal.Paradise said:
walsufnir said:
Sal.Paradise said:
walsufnir said:
AbbathTheGrim said:
Seems like the PS4 will no longer have the upper hand against PC. |
Yes, even in an architectural way, there is no advantage anymore when AMD releases this. I was wondering last week if this was all due to Cerny visiting devs and told AMD to develop for Sony or if AMD had already plans to do this and Sony just jumped on the train.
We will see if NextBox also uses this, then it's definitely invented by AMD and not Sony. The only difference remaining is GDDR5.
|
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2250802/amd-to-sell-a-cut-down-version-of-sonys-playstation-4-apu
AMD to sell a cut down version of Sony's Playstation 4 APU
Will show how much work Sony has done
CHIP DESIGNER AMD will offer a cut down version of the APU chip that will be in Sony's Playstation 4 later this year.
...
However John Taylor, head of marketing for AMD's Global Business Units, said that a version of the same chip without Sony's technology will be available for consumers later this year.
Taylor told The INQUIRER that the AMD branded APU chip will not have the same number of cores or the same computing capability as Sony's part.
...
Taylor said that this is all part of AMD's "flexible system on chip strategy", but what the upcoming A-series parts will show is just how much work Sony put into the chip that is found in the Playstation 4.
Sounds like Sony had quite a hand in the PS4's APU.
|
"He said, "Everything that Sony has shared in that single chip is AMD [intellectual property], but we have not built an APU quite like that for anyone else in the market."
As I read the article it's the number of cores that is Sony's "tech".
|
The 'number of cores' and the 'computing capabilities.' This probably has a lot to do with the customizations we've heard about from Cerny so far, especially how much he talks about compute:
The three "major modifications" Sony did to the architecture to support this vision are as follows, in Cerny's words:
- "First, we added another bus to the GPU that allows it to read directly from system memory or write directly to system memory, bypassing its own L1 and L2 caches. As a result, if the data that's being passed back and forth between CPU and GPU is small, you don't have issues with synchronization between them anymore. And by small, I just mean small in next-gen terms. We can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second down that bus. That's not very small in today’s terms -- it’s larger than the PCIe on most PCs!
- "Next, to support the case where you want to use the GPU L2 cache simultaneously for both graphics processing and asynchronous compute, we have added a bit in the tags of the cache lines, we call it the 'volatile' bit. You can then selectively mark all accesses by compute as 'volatile,' and when it's time for compute to read from system memory, it can invalidate, selectively, the lines it uses in the L2. When it comes time to write back the results, it can write back selectively the lines that it uses. This innovation allows compute to use the GPU L2 cache and perform the required operations without significantly impacting the graphics operations going on at the same time -- in other words, it radically reduces the overhead of running compute and graphics together on the GPU."
- Thirdly, said Cerny, "The original AMD GCN architecture allowed for one source of graphics commands, and two sources of compute commands. For PS4, we’ve worked with AMD to increase the limit to 64 sources of compute commands -- the idea is if you have some asynchronous compute you want to perform, you put commands in one of these 64 queues, and then there are multiple levels of arbitration in the hardware to determine what runs, how it runs, and when it runs, alongside the graphics that's in the system."
|
I know what he said but the cache-stuff seems to translate directly to what HUMA actually is. If you look at the HUMA-design it especially means that both cpu and gpu share the memory-pool and caches. There is of course details lacking. But this is another evolution of the standard apu AMD delivers today and the changes do look a lot like what Sony also said the changes were.
This doesn't mean that there is nothing more Sony added to the tech but your source only says "more cores", no matter what Cerny said also.
|
My source , AMD themselves, says will not have the same number of cores or the same computing capability as Sony's part. What specific parts of those will remain unique to the PS4's APU, we should find out when the consumer PC version releases.
Still, what my source shows is "just how much work Sony put into the chip that is found in the Playstation 4." Which is the reason I posted here in the first place, after you implying Sony may not have had a hand in any of the PS4's APU, or that GDDR5 will be the only difference, which my source shows is not true.
