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ethomaz on 07 October 2013
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Hello guys... I did a litte vacation this weekend... so I will try to resume what I read.

HIGHLIGHTS OR KEY POINTS

  • 15 co-porcessors listed: eight inside the audio block, four move engines, one video encode, one video decode and one video compositor/resizer... SO NOTHING TO HELP GRAPHICS, NO DGPU, NO SPECIAL SAUCE.
  • Co-processors are mostly reserved to Kinect and SystemOS.
  • Each game is shipped with a OS... so the virtual machine for Games only run the OS together with the game.
  • GDDR5 was uncomfortable for them in terms of power consumption and cost... well they have the expensive machine so their comments makes no sense.
  • They didn't have the tech to go with eDRAM in a single die... so they choose eSRAM.
  • The eSRAM runs at 108GB/s but if you use the same metric used for DDR3 you can get 218GB/s but in real case scenarios it will be only 70-80% of that... just me or nothing makes sense here? After they says 204GB/s for eSRAM and the real case only 140-150GB/s.
  • The typical PR: "but if you combine eSRAM and DDR3 you have more bandwidth than competition: 200GB/s".
  • The 32MB eSRAM is enough for 1080p.
  • CPU have read access to eSRAM but it is very slow... I guess they have to access the GPU to get the updates and the CPU can't write, that's mean eSRAM is not coherent.
  • 6.6% in GPU clock give more performance than 14CUs... I guess that happened because they are limited by 16ROPs.
  • The tried to use a fake example that says that PS4 was balanced to 14CUs too... bad move here.
  • They said 32ROPs are overkill for the GPU power so they choose 16ROPs... when most AMD GPUs with more than 14CUs uses 32ROPs, so I guess they are trying to hide the limitation.
  • 10% of the GPU is reserverd for Metro UI and Kinect.
  • They confirme the CPU is weak and the biggest problem for fps drops.
  • They says the 8 ACEs / 64 queues are useless so they choose 2 ACEs / 16 queues but forget to say that they didn't have extre CUs free to use these ACEs / Queues... so I agree it is useless on Xbone because you don't have free power to use them.
  • The flash NAND memory is used to cache the system data to fast boot / instant play.

Well nothing exactly new... a lot of spin... I expected more details to be fair.