Thoughts on Ryzen?

[Bofferbrauer]

Mafioso said:

Considering the release timing, Scorpio silicon could likely use a pair of Raven Ridge quads. Raven Ridge APU family will use Ryzen/Zen cores.

So no, we are not talking a Ryzen 7 CPU, but a lower powered notebook-like configuration is not out of the question. Two 1.8-2.5Ghz Quad core blocks for instance. An no it has nothing to do with comparing the desktop CPU transistor count, because in these custom SoC solutions a lot is trimmed out and configured differently 

Even if MS were to use Bristol Ridge cpu cores (unlikely as its part of a 28nm process), that Excavator solution is 100% faster than Carrizio (comparable/more efficient than Kaveri(Ps4) in gaming. In any event there is a large improvement delta over whats found on XBO.

PS4 is using Kabini (aka Jaguar), not Kaveri. But yeah, a 2 Module Bristol Ridge would likely outperform an 8Core Kabini due to higher IPC and clock speed. However, I don't think Scorpio will switch to the Module design, since they're basically End OF Life and have low Floating point calculation speed, which is critical for games. Also, the shared ressources of the modules  might be complicated to exploit properly for a console.

A simplified Zen without the L3 cache, SMT and the integrated Southbridge would be much smaller than the ones in the RyZen cores, down to maybe a quarter of the size of the PC CPU. Performance would take a hit without that cache of course, but it would still be WAY better than the old Jaguars in XBO and PS4 (Pro), even if clocked down to about 2Ghz (2.5Ghz would be probably doable in that szenario without consuming too much power). Replace all that lost space with a (Vega) GPU part and you would get a pretty good chip for a powerful console.