| JustBeingReal said: AMD have been a partner with Nintendo, providing them with their hardware for a number of console generations, it's been proven that IBM PowerPC CPU tech can be emulated on something as weak as an AMD Jaguar CPU and there would be basically no need for emulation of the Wii U GPU going to Polaris or some older GPU architecture from AMD. |
If you are basing that PowerPC emulation on the Xbox One's, Xbox 360 emulation then you might be surprised.
We know there is *some* emulation happening, Microsoft is also likely employing Binary translation, the games are also being completely repackaged in combination with some clever abstraction in a virtualised environment, but don't assume there is proper full emulation going on.
Emulation also requires substantual software engineering, in-case you aren't aware, this is Microsoft's strength, Sony and Nintendo can't hold a candle to Microsoft in this area.
| JEMC said: My heart says AMD, my brain says Nvidia. Whatever is it, tho, I hopes it's a noticeable improvement over what Wii U can do. |
This.
| Soundwave said:
Not sure why people even have that much of a hard-on from AMD ... Nvidia GPUs seem to outperform AMD most of the time from the benchmarks I've seen, AMD also doesn't have a credible mobile processor tech ... Nvidia does with Tegra. |
Actually, AMD has been able to get it's VLIW and GCN GPU architectures down to Tegra levels of power consumption.
You know "Adreno" that Qualcom uses? Re-arrange the letters and it spells out "Radeon".
Adreno is derived from AMD's technology, AMD still holds a ton of patents and design philosophies related to that chip even today, not to mention allot of the engineering talent that was responsible for Adreno's original design to start with.
PC Benchmarks are one thing as developers don't tend to target to the hardwares various nuances to obtain better performance on the PC.
For instance, AMD typically beats nVidia in anything that uses Async compute, if Polaris launched in a year or two's time, it would have been a far more praise-worthy GPU.
| Soundwave said: NX is a hybrid console, a mobile processor is neccessary for this, Nvidia has Tegra .... AMD has jack shit in that regard (Mullins ... I guess which they're not even working on). Again too from everything I've seen Nvidia simply makes better products than AMD. |
Not exactly.
Remember that all of AMD's APU's are built at 28nm, not 14nm.
Excavator FX-9800P which is built at 28nm has a TDP of 15w, 2.7-3.6ghz Dual Module/4 Integer cores, 512GCN cores (Granted only GCN 1.2/Gen 3) @ 758mhz (776 Gflop.)
The shift to 14nm brought with it gains of 2x - 2.5x, you could be looking at 6-7w of power for a reworked Excavator chip with better power states, gating and implement/improve the resonant clock mesh.
And that will give you more performance than Tegra.
As for nVidia being better than AMD, in some aspects, sure. But not in all, AMD and nVidia constantly leapfrog each other, AMD can out-perform nVidia in more modern games using Direct X 12.
The Radeon 9000, x1000, 4000, 5000, 7000 series were likely considered AMD's best lineups.
| Soundwave said: Again not even sure why people think AMD is good. Nvidia makes better GPUs flat out, the only reason Sony/MS use AMD is because AMD is willing to give them their shoddier tech for cheap. |
There is no such thing as a "bad" GPU, only a bad price.
Remember that consoles are cost sensitive devices, you aren't going to have a $1000 Titan or Fury X graphics card powered by an Intel Extreme edition processor.
AMD typically has a price advantage, which is why console manufacturers tend to choose AMD.
Besides, saying that nVidia's GPU's are better than AMD when the GPU in question is going to be a tiny underpowered Tegra chip is pretty damn laughable, it's tablet levels of performance you are talking about here, not high-end desktop parts.
| Qwark said: AMD delivers good GPU's but terrible drivers for windows, they score better lately. Anyways PC benchmarks for graphical cards don't equal those on console, mainly due to the dedicated API. Besides graphical cards are more than flops. |
The drivers are unlikely to be a point of contention on a console.
Besides, AMD's drivers I have no problems with anymore... If we were to go back to the Rage Fury MAXX days... Then you will have something to complain about. ;)
| Soundwave said: Other discussions I've seen on NeoGaf are interesting too, like the tiling aspect of Nvidia's tech (Pascal) could allow Nintendo to use much less embedded DRAM or other kind of high speed RAM. Right now they need to use a big chunk with AMD (32MB on Wii U), on Nvidia perhaps its possible they can get something similar performance wise with much less eDRAM, which would free up a lot of die space which is vitally important for hardware power. For a hybrid device that needs to run fairly high-end-ish video games, that alone could be a game breaker for Nintendo. Bandwidth is one of the key issues with mobile chips. |
nVidia's tiled based rasterization didn't start with Pascal. It started with Maxwell... And that is only thanks to Tegra.
And it affords nVidia a degree of efficiency that AMD will not be able to compete with for at-least another couple of years, with that said.. AMD GPU's on a console can also use various tiled-based approaches to make use of embedded memory, in-fact Direct X 12 has a few features that take advantage of just that on the Xbox One.
The Xbox 360 for instance had 10Mb of eDRAM, which isn't enough to hold a 1280x720 4x multisampled raster, so a tiled based approach was used.
I am a firm believer of not wasting transisters on embedded memory, you are better to spend those transisters on functional units and back the chip with high-speed memory when it makes sense.
| BlkPaladin said: I put AMD because I believe they will use an AMD supplied ARM processor though I was reading about their ARM processors, and it doesn't eliminate that NVidia may be used to supply the graphics solution. It seems there was a supercomputer that was produced that used AMD's ARM tech and NVidia's graphic |
AMD has had an ARM license for a long time now and have also built ARM chips for the server and embedded markets, they have the I.P.
They also did a substantual amount of work combining Graphics Core Next+x86+ARM in a hybrid chip before the project was scrapped due to cost cutting and reorgonization, but the chip was almost done.
| Soundwave said: If the XBox S has a new custom chip design inside of it (some people are saying it's a Polaris 11) ... that basically destroys the whole AMD theory, there's your three contract wins right there -- Scorpio, PS4 Neo, and XB1 S. |
The Xbox One S is using a new chip that is different from the Xbox One, that can't be disputed.
The three contracts would likely be in reference to the Xbox One S, Scorpio and Neo.
| JEMC said: The Tegra X1 is a good compromise as it allows devs to start working on a machine with ARM processors and GPU architectures like those found in current PCs. |
Didn't realise I had an ARM CPU in my PC. ;)
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
