| EricHiggin said: MS has been clear about how they want balance. Jaguar+Vega is CPU light and GPU strong. Excavator would be much closer but still CPU light. Ryzen, which would be a cut down 8 core version or a full 4 core, would be balanced. The only way it ends up being Jaguar, is if they somehow manage to clock it at 3Ghz+ and that is super unlikely. |
Consoles have never taken CPU performance seriously anyway, so why would they start now and waste money on something that doesn't make pretty pictures on the screen?
| EricHiggin said: Ryzen may not be as powerful or could be expensive yes, but like Athlon 64, it's most likely going to meet all expectations. Jim Keller. Right now AMD can't afford to screw this CPU arch up. |
Keller left AMD a years ago.
| EricHiggin said: A 2020 PS5 could maybe use an AMD ARM CPU, but most likely x86, making it Ryzen or better. |
And you know this how? AMD does have other CPU Architectures.
2020 is a long way away in the PC world. AMD may have ditched Ryzen and Socket AM4 by then and released a successor.
| EricHiggin said: Vega seems like the only thing everyone can agree on lol. |
It's logical that's why.
| craighopkins said: I can see vega/ryzen in Phil Spencers smile. hehe |
I always claimed Vega was a possibility... But it becomes more likely as time goes on, the timing just aligns really well for Microsoft to take advantage of Vega.
And to be fair, people thought the Playstation 4 Pro was going to use something more exotic for the CPU. (Aka. Not Jaguar.) but costs do play a role in these cost-sensitive devices, CPU's take a back seat to GPU performance in consoles, always have... Because of cost. (Aka. You can't have everything.)
shikamaru317 said:
Technically you're right, but I don't think MS is that stupid. Sony already pushed Jaguar to it's limits with PS4 Pro and it still bottlenecks the GPU by a pretty considerable amount. I don't think MS is dumb enough to make the same mistake, the 6 tflop GPU would be a complete waste if they did. They've closely listened to developer feedback from both western and Japanese 3rd party devs while developing it, and I'm sure that many 3rd party devs have been asking for a good CPU due to the bottlenecking issues they've ran into with Jaguar on PS4 and XB1. I think some mobile Excavator cores are the actual bare minimum we will see on Scorpio. |
Jaguar can still be pushed harder, it's far from being at it's limit.
The Athlon 5370 for example had a clockrate of 2.2Ghz vs the PS4 Pro's 2.1Ghz... But the Athlon was also built at 28nm not 16/14nm which should give you some extra clock rate wiggle room at the same TDP... Plus these consoles are using a Semi-Custom chip design, not a direct clone of the PC chips, AMD would be reworking some things, so they could push for higher clock rates.
Bottlenecks aren't really a thing in consoles anyway, developers work around them well enough... Plus bottlenecks will change depending on a games scene/game engine/price of a can of beans in China... Plus everyone keeps ignoring Jaguars real-life successors... Puma and Puma+. - Which can go over the 2.5ghz barrier.
The other option is... Microsoft just throws another 4x Jaguar cores at the problem and goes wider rather than faster, Excavator would probably still be more transistor heavy than Jaguar/Puma or Puma+ though especially if you push for 8 threads.
GPU's are also able to lift some of the work CPU's typically do anyway these days, developers just need to be a little more creative with how they approach it.
| hudsoniscool said: I agree especially when you consider phils answer to the question: Use one word to describe Scorpio. He said 'balanced'. I'm pretty sure putting a jaguar in there would be anything but balanced. |
Sadly. He didn't give any pointers to what that hardware might entail.
'balanced' is certainly different in the console world than on PC. The fact that eveything targets a low-level API for extra performance, certainly helps remove a large emphasis on CPU performance.
... And I keep coming back to the original issue. Cost. Cost and Cost.
The general consensus is that Vega is in. There is the possibility of 12Gb GDDR5 memory on a 384bit memory bus for 320GB/s of bandwidth... And that doesn't leave much room for a beefy CPU.
Don't get me wrong, I would love for a console manufacturer to take CPU performance seriously for once, but we need to set realistic expectations, unless you are hoping to pay $1000 for a console.
I'm thinking Microsoft will opt to continue it's use of AMD Cat cores, they work well. They are cheap.
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