John Kodera: “PS4 Is Entering The Final Stages Of It’s Life-Cycle.”

[Pemalite]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Pemalite said:

They usually get around that issue by not building monolithic sized chips that are extremely complex.

And often a new node is used on small ARM chips, not server chips... I mean shit. TSMC's 7nm process already has a ton of partners signed up using the process, majority are all pretty much ARM chips with big x86 and GPU's coming later.

That's always a bulk process, not a HPP (High Power Plus) process as needed for PCs, Consoles and servers. Bulk processes are ready earlier because they are less complex but in return also much less powerful. For High Power processes server chips or High-End GPU are generally the way to go. Hence why the x86 and GPU production at TSMC is coming later: Their High Power Process is not yet in production, only their Bulk processes.

Hence my point. ;)

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Edit: The problem with not building monolithic is small with CPU (mainly just higher latency), but not nearly so easy to solve in GPU. Navi is potentially (and hopefully) coming with a solution to this problem, otherwise it will need a pretty big GPU - bigger in square mm than PS4 Pro by around 50% even though produced in a 7nm process just to get a chip powerful enough to get enough distance between itself and the Pro. This would not only be pretty expensive for a console chip due to it's size, but also a pretty large heat producer

 

GCN can scale upwards and downwards.

At the moment AMD has a max hard limit of 64CU's in the GCN layout, so I would assume Navi wouldn't push past that.

If all other things are equal, we may just get a moderate transistor increase over Vega rather than anything overtly dramatic... And that should mean it would be a more conservative size than Vega when built at the pseudo-7nm verses 14nm process.

Next Gen though is when all the gloves come off and we may see a deviation from GCN and all the rubbish holding the uArch back.

With that in mind...Sony and Microsoft may decide not to opt for a 64CU part anyway and go with something more conservative again (Remember, consoles cannot afford high-end hardware!) and thus drive up the clock rates instead to make up the difference, Microsoft did go in that direction with the Xbox One X.