| jonathanalis said: The thing that annoys me is talking that switch could receive a super dock, with extra memory and compute power. No, it is technically impossible. |
It really is. And I have already talked indepth prior on these forums on why it is technically impossible.
I did expect more from Digital Foundry especially when it comes to assertions such as these.
| potato_hamster said: First, I love how my post was about how the technology isn't there and then in response, you go about talking about hypothetical chips that do not exist that supposedly proves it does. |
Consoles typically use semi-custom designs, Thus the "Hypothetical" chips generally don't exist until they hit the market anyway.
There is only one exception that comes to mind though... The Switch.
| potato_hamster said: Increasing performance increases power draw. |
Not always. Back in the Dothan/Bonais days... Intel was rapidly increasing chip performance to save on power draw... As the mantra of "Hurry up and finish and go back to idle" was a key point in chip design philosophy... In short the faster the chip, the faster it can get the processing task done and the faster the chip can go to idle, switch to a lower power state and save on power.
| potato_hamster said: You're acting like Sony can just take something like the 2300U, increase a little of this, decrease a little that, and blammo! PS4 APU with a 12W TDP, and about the same price as the PS4's current APU. Sorry, it's not that simple. Decreasing power draw decreases performance. You might be able to take a more... bleeding edge approach to the design, the that will almost undoubtedly decrease yields and blow up the cost of the chip. Working chips pay for dead ones. That's how it works. |
The 2300U is a baseline of what to expect with AMD's current technology on the current fabrication process with it's current chip designs.
Obviously a semi-custom design will be tweaked to meet various goals.
There would not for instance be a need to have the CPU's operate at such a high clock and thus voltage (Remember, voltage has a direct relationship with power consumption!) as Zen is significantly more efficient than Jaguar. I mean significant.
| potato_hamster said: This isn't rocket science. Yet you're advocating for a higher performance, lower TDP chip, presumably for the same price seeing as you think Sony can make this PS4 portable for less than $400 even accounting for the fact that any memory and storage solution would be undoubtedly higher than what's in the PS4 and the fact that it would have to have a 1080p screen and a battery. It doesn't add up. |
* It wouldn't have to have a 1080P screen. Super Sampling is a thing you know.
The Playstation 4 SoC is based on Graphics Core Next 1.0, which is slow, old, power hungry and inefficient.
Vega is leagues ahead of it in every scenario. (And probably more so once AMD sorts out it's Primitive Shaders and Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer bullshit.)
| potato_hamster said: Furthermore, where do you think I to supposed to logically land going from 14 nm to 7 nm? What are you basing that off of? If you're basing it on previous advancements, such as say going from 20 nm to 14 nm, is it still reasonable to apply here? Do we know enough about this new 7nm fabrication process to be able to predict what kind of TDP improvement we should get? Will that 7nm process be stable enough to produce cost-effective yields in the next year or so? |
Early reports are placing the 7nm process at a 2.6x improvement over 14nm.
TSMC was pegging their 7nm process to be a 1.63x improvement over their 10nm process, which in turn had a 14nm BEOL.
TSMC's 16nm process had a 20nm BEOL.
You need to keep in mind that these aren't actually 7nm and 14nm fabrication processes though, they have been bastardized into advertising numbers to trick the less educated.
But the improvement from TSMC's 16nm to 7nm is bloody massive. Global Foundries, Samsung and so on are seeing similar improvements.
The jump to "7nm" is probably going to be one of the most significant fabrication improvements we have seen in a long time.
| potato_hamster said: What kind of modifications (if any) can AMD make to the design of the chip to make it power efficient than their current offeringgs? |
Is this hypothetical? Or do you want a list? I can provide a list.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
