| shikamaru317 said: In case you guys missed it, Super Metal Dave, whose Nintendo leaks earlier this year were accurate, said he disagrees with Emily about NX not using Polaris. He believes NX is using Polaris 11, which according to yesterday's spec leaks is a 2.5 tflop GPU that only uses 50w of power, so both more effiecient and more powerful than PS4's GPU but less powerful than PS4K's GPU. He has said many times that Polaris 11's low power draw matches with Nintendo's statements about designing an efficient console, and that the timing of Polaris' design matches with when Nintendo started shopping around for NX tech. He believes that NX was the "design win" that AMD mentioned to investor's late last year. He only disagrees with Emily about Polaris though, he says she may be right about it not being x86 (so likely ARM for easier porting between the console and the rumored Tegra based handheld). |
Polaris 11 on the Desktop/Mobile might be pushing out that kind of performance... But keep in mind, Polaris isn't a beast because of how large and wide the chip is, but because of the sheer clockspeeds. - If Nintendo goes with a conservative clock, then it is entirely possible for it to fall short of the PS4's GPU.
COKTOE said:
Gamecube was not more powerful than the original Xbox. |
Depends. In some aspects the Gamecube could beat the Xbox in some specific tasks that leveraged fixed function hardware, the Xbox though would win overall as it was a more balanced design.
| JRPGfan said: This makes much more sense. If AMD has a new gen of GPUs ready, that are able to do 2.5 Tflops (36% faster than PS4) for less than 50watts. That sounds like something Nintendo could use, and ask AMD to make them a semi custum APU, with ARM + Polaris 11. |
Yes and no.
We need more details before we start throwing around guestimates on performance... Besides. Polaris thanks to it's more moden core should be able to do more work per flop than the chips that exists in the Xbox One and Playstation 4.
But if Nintendo goes with a conservative clock speed (Which consoles typically do...) then it may be entirely possible for the chip to come up short against the PS4.
| JustBeingReal said: If Nintendo are going arm this time, but under-powered yet again then there's no way 3rd party developers are touching them. Using CPU architecture that was different from where the industry was moving to was one of the main reasons why 3rd party publishers dropped their support for Wii U. |
Depends. There is a difference between just scaling down a few effects and having a generation difference, if devs can get away with the former, then Nintendo will win some Multiplats.
| JustBeingReal said: If Xbox One had been built around a philosophy of gaming first, as far as it's hardware goes then Microsoft would have used a combination of DDR3 and GDDR5, which would have meant the SOC die wouldn't have needed to forfit valuable die space to eSRAM, it could have used more Compute Units, but just add in an extra memory controller to use 2 seperate pools. Also Xbox One would have been a genuine HSA system, instead of one where the majority of the system bandwidth isn't diirectly accessible to the CPU, meaning the design would have been overall much more efficient. |
Disagree. eSRAM is fantastic. When implemented correctly to supplement a system, it can boost bandwidth, reduce latency, reduce power consumption.
If Microsoft kept the eSRAM and main system SoC as seperate entities, then utilized the transisters for a larger GPU unit in the SoC, they would have been onto a winner.
HSA is also not a game changer, so many promises about HSA... And it just hasn't happened. Like... At all, probably never will amount to anything.
If Microsoft implemented eSRAM so it was like an off-chip L4 cache (I.E. Intels' approach.) then things could have been different...
They could have even retained the DDR3 Ram, if they made it wider and faster. DDR3 *can* be faster than GDDR5.
lmaobox said:
The APU is from AMD. The SoC is SONY technology designed by Mark Cerny. The APU is only part of the SoC. Everything else on the SoC has to be well-balanced in order for you to use the best APU and get the most out of it. |
The SoC is entirely AMD design. All Mark Cerny did was petition AMD for a set of specifications and would have gone back and forth diplomatically so Sony got what it wanted.
Sony isn't allowed to work on AMD's technology at a low intimite level due to the x86 license, this is literally by law. - They can only make suggestions.
| lmaobox said: Yes, I understand both the CPUs and GPUs on the Xbone and PS4 are just vanilla AMD parts with very slight customizations and downclocks/upclocks, but the SoCs are entirely custom-designed. |
So what is it? Either the SoC is vanilla, or it is entirely custom designed? An APU and a SoC isn't as different as you think it is.
SoC = System on Chip. That includes the CPU (AMD), GPU (AMD), various pieces of logic (AMD), Caches (AMD) Audio (AMD), networking (AMD) and other parts of a general chipset (Again, AMD.)
AMD makes it all even on the PC and server segments and even custom solutions for 3rd party's. AMD also owns all the I.P.
| lmaobox said: An APU is just a CPU and GPU on a single die to create a cost-efficient processor. An SoC can contain an APU. If AMD designed the SoC, then the PS4 and Xbone would have the same exact specs, or at least similar architectures. By having 2 vastly different architectures, you're implying AMD did R&D 2 times for both SONY and MS, which is nonsense. AMD would have only done R&D once and used the results for that R&D for both SONY and MS. SONY and MS both designed their own SoC. AMD only supplied the APU based on what SONY and MS wanted. Nothing more. |
The vast majority of the SoC, is the CPU and GPU in terms of die area and transister count. A SoC just includes other logic like Audio, networking, chipset, caches etc'.
The reason why the PS4 and Xbox One don't have the exact same specs is simple. AMD kept both companies seperate when both companies started to petition AMD for their semi-custom designs, AMD would have been under Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA) also.
AMD didn't have to do the R&D twice because they weren't building chips from the ground up.
AMD has "Library's" Or chunks of functioning silicon, almost like blocks... And they can put various blocks together to build differently configured chips, sometimes they will update 1 library and keep the other library the same which is why sometimes AMD updates the GPU in an APU and not the CPU or vice-versa.
fatslob-:O said:
AMD DID design the PS4 and X1 chips ... There's no arguing it ... |
I think he is in denial.
lmaobox said:
No. They designed the CPU and GPU as well as the single die containing the CPU and GPU (APU), but the overall SoCs were designed by SONY and MS for their repective platforms. |
Nope.
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