Prediction - PS3-PS4 and X360-XOne last big performance spec leap

[Bofferbrauer2]

thismeintiel said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

No offense, but those specs for a hypotetical PS5 are bullshit

1. 15 TFlops will be very hard to cool in a console, even in 7nm. But more to the point is the size of the necessary Graphics chip, which even in 7nm would be quite a lot bigger than the ones in PS4 Pro and XOX. This would make it very expensive to produce - too expensive for a console.

2. 28 GB is in Computer terms a very odd number and would need a very wierd connection (like 224bit compared to the more even 192bit or 256bit). Additionally this would be very expensive even if the RAM prices would normalize again. Finally, it's just too much for a console, 16Gbyte it will most probably be, possibly 24 if we're really lucky, but not 28.

3. Ryzen 12core (and probably 24 threads) are way too much. Most game engines can't handle more than 4 threads efficiently, 6-8 threads is the limit. The problem is not that there's no wish to use more threads, but to actually being able to parallelise the workload enough to fill them all. Also, again, too big of a chip for a console, half of it would be much better.

The problem stems from willing to compare Desktop PC hardware to console hardware. But since Consoles are much more limited in cooling, consumption, part size and price range, it's actually much closer to look at the mobile market, more specifically gaming laptops, especially those considered desktop replacements.

Just for comparision, the PS4 Graphics part has 1.8 TFlops. At the same time the 7970M was out for gaming Laptops and had 2.1 TFlops. PS4 Pro: 4.2 TFlops, R9 395M: 3.7 TFlops (the RX 485M is clocked much lower (almost 200Mhz)  than it's predecessor to limit consumption and thus actually has less power, would it have had the same clock speed it would have been more or less as fast as the Pro)

I definitely agree with 2 and 3. The PS5 is more than likely to get 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, with possibly 1-2 GB of DDR3/4 dedicated to the OS.  And I'm thinking Sony will go with a 8 core Ryzen APU.  That's going to be a big leap over the Jaguar, and probably help them achieve B/C with the PS4 much easier.  

Where I disagree is 1.  While I believe 12-12.5 Tflops is more likely, 15 isn't out of the question.  I think the purpose of the Pro was twofold.  One was to take advantage of a budding 4K market.  But, the 2nd one was to allow their engineers to experiment in making a console that needed better cooling and had a larger power draw.  I think they are more than capable of putting a 12 Tflops, and even a 15Tflops, GPU in something the size of the Pro.

Keep in mind that to reach 12.5 TFlops, the RX Vega 64 has to be running at top speed of 1550Mhz - which it can't keep on most Graphics cards without throttling to not exceed it's power draw target of 295W. A console graphics chip needs to run at clock speeds much closer to it's sweet spot, which in Vegas case is in the 1100-1200Mhz range, at which point it's doing less than 10 TFlops. So in order to achieve 15 TFlops the chip would need to become both bigger (expensive) and have it's sweet spot at much higher clock speeds. Unless they can reach that while consuming less than 150W, which is half of what it consumes right now, 15 TFlops won't be possible. Considering that Polaris didn't manage to half the consumption of Hawaii for the same calculation speed while being 2 GCN Architectures and a jump from 28 to 14nm ahead, I have a hard time believing this to happen.

The 12TFlops you're expecting are far more manageable, hence why I'm expecting about as much. In any case, due to diminishing returns however, the visible difference between Pro and 5 will be pretty small in most cases