| drkohler said: Actually, Zen has very small cores (4.9mm^2 reportedly). |
Going to need to see the evidence for that one... As I highly doubt it's going to be competitive with AMD's small cat cores.
Jaguar for instance was 3.1mm at 28nm per core, Intel's haswell core that Zen should be doing battle against was 14.5mm at 22nm, if AMD chooses TSMC 20nm rebranded 16nm Finfet... Well. You get the idea, i just don't see Zen having a third of the die size as Haswell.
Intel had a 64% reduction when moving from 22nm to 14nm... And Intel scales it's fabrication better than TSMC.
Remember that Zen is pretty wide (Twice as wide as Jaguar) and had to bolster/duplicate large chunks of the pipeline in order to accomidate AMD's version of Hyper Threading, higher associative cache, better branch prediction and pre-fetcher, Micro-Op cache... And everything seems to be power gated which also costs transisters.
| drkohler said: That would make a fictional 8core Neo (or even a 6core unit would suffice) feasible inside a Neo SoC. However, all that cache ultimately makes the whole package too big/expensive for a console. Also AMD in its roadmaps for the Zen architecture does not show third party access to the Zen architecture until 2017. The design of the Neo SoC was likely finished in (late?) 2015 so that simply doesn't compute for Zen. |
Yeah. Zen isn't light on cache, although, AMD will likely do a version without any L3 cache which could drastically reduce the die size, but we still aren't talking Jaguar levels here. :P
| drkohler said: The next idiotic rumours came up when "4k gaming" was the new buzzword. The Neo is not equipped for 4k gaming. For 4k gaming you do not only need TFlops (Compute Units), you need enough TMUs and ROPs and memory bandwidth. NIVidia's new 10x0 gpu line has 48-64 ROPs (with double raster power), high clock rates and high memory bandwitdh to get into the 4k terrain. The Neo SoC most likely has none of all that. Spicing up the PS4 memory bandwidth to a possible 220GB/s gives you more room for compute usage (good for PSVR use and cpu/gpu sharing of the bus), but by far not enough for "true" 4k gaming. |
I'm well aware and keep trying to tell people this. Haha
| drkohler said: Why don't people just wait a week or so to see what Sony has to say about the Neo (provided that announcement really opens up the hardware)? Personally I can see a Neo SoC with upclocked Jaguar cores (we know the 14/16nm design was done because of XBox Slim) and a gpu with double the CUs (excellent for gpgpu stuff) and unknown TMU count and same 32 ROPs due to 256 bit memory bus. That would be completely in line with the original 4.2TF rumour. |
Puma+ is also a feasible alternative to Jaguar.
| KBG29 said: As I understood it, the Jaguar architecture has heat issues, so the best balance they could achieve with it is the rumorex specs we know. According to what I read the Zen tech would be capable of running at higher clocks with lower temps and allow them to push the GPU clock up as well. Since we are talking about an APU the CPU has a direct effect on the GPU. |
Jaguar is fine and at 14 or 16nm would have decent power consumption.
It doesn't really affect the GPU's Teraflops though as that is always going to be a theoretical ceiling.
| KBG29 said: True, that was not worded well, there is plenty of room for higher output with overclocking and the sufficient cooling. The source I saw said they would be able to reach the same 5.5TF as the RX 480. |
It's not overclocking though.
AMD will bin chips depending on how well they operate at a certain given frequency with a certain level of voltage, some chips require more, some require less and that can influence maximum clock rate if you need to hit a certain TDP.
With aggressive binning you can release a chip with a higher clock speed, on the same fabrication and use less energy.
For example... If Sony was more aggressive with the PS4 binning... They could have made the PS4's APU 20% faster and used 20% less power.
| KBG29 said: Even if it is what we have seen in the rumors, it is well capable of 4K and 30fps in many games both AAA, and indie. Obviously devs will decide what they want to do with it, but I have no doubt all Nuaghty Dog, Sony Santa Monica, Guerrilla Games, and Polyphony Digital games will be 4K in the single player portion. |
It doesn't have the grunt for 4k and 30fps, not with all the settings dialed up anyway, simpler/older and indie games sure.
And do you really only want to play only PS4-levels of graphics and nothing more?
For 4k gaming expectations... You just need to look at Polaris anyway, it's a GPU that is better suited to 1080P and 1440P, no question.
| KBG29 said: They are not the say all be all, but when we are talming similar architecture they do hold some wieght. |
But it really doesn't hold any weight.
Flops are calculated as Clock Rate * 2 * Shader count.
So for instance... If you had two GPU's that had 1 Terafaflop of performance, identical amount of shaders, identical clock speed...
But one GPU had 50% more memory bandwidth, 50% more Render Output Units, 50% more Texture Mapping Units, 50% more geometry engines... Then even though they both have the same identical Teraflop ceiling... One will be substnatually faster, in-some cases by 50%.
And this is why you cannot compare the PS4 GPU against the Neo's "theoretical" hardware, because even if the Neo had the same amount of bandwidth on paper... It actually has substantually more.
Plus, even comparing AMD's GPU's on Teraflops alone tends to be inaccurate at best anyway, there are some parts with more flops, that are actually slower than parts with less flops.
| KBG29 said: We just have to wait and see what Neo ends up being. I feel like they are making a high end A/V devices type of market in the console space. This is a place where you can find $1000+ Blu-Ray Players, and multi-thousand dollar receivers, both of which have much much lower priced entry level devices. So Neo could be anywhere from $399.99 to $999.99, we just have to see. |
If they can nail it with the Multimedia they could very well indeed be onto a winner, that's for sure.
Microsoft won the multimedia Battle with it's Xbox One Slim console, so it would be fantastic if the Neo was competitive on that front. (The PS4 and Slim certainly aren't.)
| KBG29 said: Again, we just have to see. I think the base parts are no more than $140 on the PS4 2000 when you take the APU. So I think they have a ton of room to go with the new APU and additional RAM and still stay in that price range. |
Well. We have no idea what actual hardware the Neo is using just yet. For all we know it could be a derivative of Vega.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
