Refresh consoles vs. 9th gen

[vivster]

Arkaign said:
What? Even at 14nm, CPUs based on AMD Zen's reported performance level would have a ludicrous advantage over the pathetic glorified 8-core netbook garbage that Jaguar is, at 1.6Ghz to add insult to injury.

"AMD isn't yet discussing Zen's target clockspeed, but some leaked benchmarks last week purported to show an 8C/16T Zen engineering sample clocked at 2.8GHz base/3.2GHz turbo—which is pretty impressive when you consider that engineering samples are often clocked significantly lower than retail parts. I don't want to get my hopes up just yet, but the benchmarks did appear to show pretty decent performance for the Zen chip."

What does that mean? Well, examining the IPC of Jaguar vs. other CPUs in the record from Anandtech, and extrapolating (Jaguar single core vs Sandy Bridge, SB per core vs Broadwell-E, and assign 15% HT boost and appropriate clock speed scaling), the CPU power of a theoretical 3Ghz/3.4Ghz 8C/16T Zen would be WELL OVER 18x faster than the 1.6Ghz Jaguar CPU. EIGHTTEEN TIMES MORE PROCESSING POWER. That's not trivial.

Bottlenecking from CPU for dramatically complex game worlds would be insanely reduced. AI could be dramatically more free. FPS caps in MP without having to be hamstrung by the trash Jaguar products would enable almost universal 60FPS if combined with a respectable GPU as well (Scorpio will come fairly close, but the reported performance target is slightly under the ideal).

Not to mention that being stuck with 8GB RAM is highly restrictive as well. It sounded really impressive in 2013, but if that is the limit due to having to constantly dev to the lowest common denominator, that means 4-5GB (non-OS locked) is the total VRAM+Game executables that is available for design, outside of the extra 4GB on Scorpio, which of course won't be freed for exclusive game development anyway to appease the people that want the aging 2013 models to have parity.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/08/amd-zen-performance-details-release-date/

Great points for releasing next gen consoles! Still waiting though for arguments against releasing a mid gen upgrade.