| CommonNinja said: Ok, that makes more sense. I'm really interested to see what the role of the CPU will be in the next consoles as CPUs are slowly becomming more and more irrelevent with GPU compute. I'm sure they will still have one, but I just can't help but feel like a big hw breakthrough with new teck may be just around the corner. |
Personally, I don't think the PS5/Xbox 'Two' will have the a-typical CPU/GPU combinations.
AMD's fusion initiative has been on a quest to combine the CPU and GPU so that they are one and the same, still allot of obsticals to get around that though, HSA/hUMA were stepping stones to that goal as was the GPU/CPU on the same package, then die.
Historically CPU's and GPU's have been converging on a fundamental level, CPU's are gradually becoming more heavily threaded whilst GPU's are becoming more programmable, so you can see how they may converge in the future.
CPU's will still be required however, due to their excellent serial processing performance and GPU's won't be going away because of their parallel processing capabilities.
However if you look at AMD's FX architectures with a castrated shared floating point unit, you can see the focus is more aligned towards that of integer performance, GPU's however are actually extremely good at floating point, in an architecture that would be leveraging both strengths, they could assist each other in workloads that they are best suited for, the transisters could then be optimised for the best performance/watt/die area.
As for those who are using "TFLOP" to gauge a systems performance, I laught at you all, it has no actual bearing on performance at all, much like the old "mhz" myth.
For instance, you can have two processors with the EXACT same amount of "TFLOP". However, remove the caches, predicters, buffers and 99% of the interconnect bandwidth on one processor, then it's going to be a fraction of the performance of the other processor, despite having the exact same "TFLOP" rating, hence it's useless.
www.youtube.com/@Pemalite
