| JEMC said: Ok, fine. I don't want to enter into a tech war that I know I'm going to lose anyway. But what I was trying to say, besides the obvious, is that the next time putting more of everything will not work... but not because it wouldn't be possible or a good way to go, but because it could be too expensive. Think about what you said, go from 1100 shaders to 4 or 5 thousand. With the problems TSMC is having reducing the manufacturing processes and chip with so many "bits" in it is going to be or very expensive, or very big, or both. So I don't think numbers will increase that much because we are at a point (or we'll reach it very soon), that GPUs will have to look at CPU development and forget the old "more and faster" approach and instead start focusing more on efficiency, like Nvidia seems to have done. But of course that's just me and my rumblings. |
We are kinda in agreement. Though I think of it somewht differently.
First off, where we disagree is that I know thats not how chip manufacturing works. Have you ever heard this saying about how much a processor cost?
"The first processor off the production line costs $5B. Every chip after that costs $15."
That is basically telling you that what makes chips expensive is the amount of R&D that goes into them. But the actual chip from an actual wafer doesn't really cost that much. So yes, for every $15 chip that comes off the fab line, over $5B in R&D could have been sunk into it. They make that money back either from chargng a premium per chip or just having a very very high volume of chips ordered. How this ties into consoles, right now theer are already processors that are pushing upwards of 4000 shader cores on a 28nm fab process. The cheapest one of such procesors cost $399 today at retail. So probably costs the OEM (AMD in this case) $249 to order from whoever actually makes it for them. In two years, that exact same chip will cost half as much if not less. And in 5, significantly less. Now the second a company like sony or MS comes in and signs a deal with AMD for those chips to put in their next console, AMD is looking at potentially over 100M orders for the chip, this can bring the cost of the chips down much much more. So even if by that time we are stuck at a 14nm fab process, I wouldn't expect the PS4 to have anything more than a chip that has more than 4000-5000 cores even if as you say (and I agree) they can put in more.
Where we agree is that I also don't think next gen will be just about more of everything. Thas what this gen is for. Next gen would be about focusing on specific areas in the hardware that would optimize performance much more than just throwing in more RAM or more cores. A lot of people talk up things like 4k rez, I think that stuff like that is irelevant with regard to the bigger picture. The extra power in the consoles would be geared towards things like better AI, Physics, global illumination..etc while still maintaining a 1080p frame buffer and at most liklye stable 30/60fps. And the rendered frame would just be upscaled to 4k if needed by a special seperate upscaler chip. Its just a better smarter use of resources.
This is why I feel that when people talk about next gen hardware now, they aren't actually talking about the things everyone is really gonna focus on. They are just talking about the stuff we all know to talk about toay. CPU/GPU/RAM. Those aren't the areas that would define the next gen consoles.
