| EricHiggin said: It goes on to talk about Polaris energy efficiency improvments added to the GPU, but they stay away from saying its Pitcairn or Polaris because I guess truthfully its just a hybrid between them. Semi-custom. |
Correct. It is Semi-custom. Even the base Playstation 4 deviates from Pitcairn (Graphics Core Next 1.0) in a few areas.
They took that base PS4 design and improved on a few areas, whilst doubling the functional units.
Graphics Core Next is surprisingly modular, if you only wanted to improve a single aspect, you can and leave the rest of the chip the same, this is why Polaris is pretty much ISA compatible with Graphics Core Next 1.2.
| EricHiggin said: This is why I don't see PS5 being that much of a leap over Pro. When they say things like "whats possible" it sounds like they are more worried about gameplay and VR. |
Depends. The Playstation 5 should deviate from Graphics Core Next and use AMD's Next-Gen Compute Unit (NCU) or a derivative-of which should flop-for-flop be a substantual jump over Graphics Core Next.
Navi should refine that farther.
First we need Vega to land so we can get a better idea on AMD's efficiency gains with the new Architecture and so we can get a better idea of next-gen capabilities.
| EricHiggin said: Yes the GPU's are designed for 7nm, but many archs are shrunk, so why couldn't they enlarge them to 14nm for APU's? |
Cost and power consumption.
When 28nm got delayed, AMD didn't just release Graphics Core Next on the larger 40nm process, rather AMD decided it will customize it's VLIW5 architecture and gave us VLIW4 as the interim solution.
| EricHiggin said: There's a lot of rumours out there talking about 12Tflop Vega, so why couldn't PS5 hit 8-10 Tflops with a more advanced Vega/ Navi on 14nm? |
The chip would be so massive and power hungry, that the price would be ridiculous and you would need a Nuclear Reactor to power it, remember you need to include the CPU, chipset and other logic into that chip as well.
Jaguar was already transister efficient, throwing something like Zen+ or a derivative-of would blow the die-size out.
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