By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
drkohler on 13 June 2016
Edit Thread
Ganoncrotch said:
drkohler said:

There are variuos roads that lead to that value. Coincidentally, the NVidia 1080 has a 256bit wide GDDR5X bus that leads to that value. Being the next generation, I'd suppose MS would want to add some more memory than the existing 8G. So you can get to the 320GB/s using a 320bit GDDR5 bus or a 384bit GDDR5 bus. The first option gets you to 10GB of memory, the second one gets you to 12GB of memory. At some point you pay too much for chips and die space for the gddr5 interface (which is very hard to shrink, and look at the space it takes on the PS4 die!) so I'd guess a 512bit bus is off limits.

My second guess is that the 320GB/s bus excludes any further use of embedded esram as that would be wasted space and costs on the die.

Don't forget as well that it won't be appearing for another 18 months, they could well be just putting down a plan of specs on a sheet of paper right now (along with some fancy cgi images of a PCB lol) but yeah there is every likelyhood that they're not intending to get that level of power and bandwidth with the very best of what there is on offer in 2016 but more likely they'll aim to achieve it with middle of the road tech in 2017.

18 months sound like a long time, unfortunately it isn't at all in the mass manufacturing/electronics business. The fact is that MS has to finalise the hardware components very soon if they want to come out by late 2017 with this Scorpio box. They better hope that HBM/interposer prices don't fall too fast until 2018 otherwise bandwidth will become available that makes 320GB/s look like a joke by then. Then again, I wonder where that 6TF number comes from. Again, that 6TF design thing must exist pretty much now. The soon-to-arive AMD 480 won't get you there and is rated at 150W which is already too high for a console gpu. Unless the whole spec thing is more or less a bluff by MS to take the wind off Sony.