| Trumpstyle said: Which mechanical disks? I have checked information about Hamr and Mamr Disks but I don't think they will be ready in time for next-gen. Predicting what hard drive ps5 will use is difficult. Eurogamer says mechanical drives are to slow and I have come to the conclusion that a hybrid solution with 1TB mechanical disk with 256GB ssd is useless. Right now 1 TB SSD seems to the most reasonable guess what ps5 will launch with. |
I have a theory on a possible viable storage solution. Rather than any of what most think, they could just split the storage into system storage a general storage of sorts.
Right now n 250GB nvme drive cost as little as $100 on amazon. At console volumes that could be costing as little as $35 for sony/MS. Now in 2020 I believe sony and MS can get a 500GB nvme SSD in volume at around $40/$50 per drive. But there is an even cheaper way to do this, they can literally build the "nvme SSD" right onto the PCB. So the console can ship with like 500GB of nvme based built in storage and an empty mechanical HDD bay for those that want to slap in a HDD for more storage. Or just launch with the external HDD support option right out the gate and not even borther with an internal mechanical HDD bay.
| Alby_da_Wolf said: If they stick with UMA, the GDDR must work again as both graphics and system RAM, so it's not very precise to compare that amount of RAM with the amount used in a discrete graphics card. Obviously a GDDR based UMA offers far greater graphics performance than cheap DDR based UMAs used in cheap PCs, while offering almost the same advantages in design simplicity, and it proved to be a great solution for a console, but should it become too expensive if RAM prices don't drop quick enough for the amount of total RAM they wish to have next gen, they could settle for going back to a classic separate memories solution, and in this case, even 12GB GDDR for the graphics would be a very good amount, while for system RAM we could maybe get 16-20GB latest DDR4 or early DDR5. This if obviously a possible scenario if they end up deciding that 16GB wouldn't be enough, as we all agree that 16GB GDDR UMA is definitely feasible and viable. In the end, anyway, the reality is that the ridiculous RAM price situation forced devs to stop the growth of at least games minimum specs for RAM size, and as the quality of the best games increased anyway, this most probably means that lower level devs made the latest versions of game engines more CPU/GPU-intensive while keeping them not too much more memory-intensive than the previous versions, at least in the low and mid settings |
I think some of you guys as missing something on this whole split memory thing. There is a reason I mention LPDDR4 rm as opposed to just DDR4.
Size. Or amount of modules needed so to speak.
DDR4 while offering much higher bandwith, would require quite a good amount of ram chips flanking the CPU. I mean right now we literally need 8 ram modules to get 8GB of DDR4. So where are the GDDR6 going to go on a console sized PCB?
But using LPDDR4, they can get all 8GB of it in a module just slightly bigger than one GDDR6 module.
The only issue being that it has a peak bandwith of around 32GB/s. But that will be more than enough if all it does is run the OS of the consoles and OS application outside games.
This also allows them splurge on GDDR6 and put in as much as they ca possibly put in (again my guess here is around 18GB-20GB, then throw in 8GB of LPDDR4 in there for the OS and maybe even to load off certain game code to further reduce how much of the GDDR6 is wasted.
I am not sure how much bandwith is needed for the CPU loop of game code, but if its something that 32GB/s of bandwith can cover, then we may even have a situation where the next gen consoles have as much as 16LPDDR4 ram and 16GB of dedicated vram and have game code use both pools of memory.
Or even more interesting, having two modules of LPDDR4 ram (which would be needed to get 16GB of LPDDR4) may also allow double the bandwith... though I am not sure this is possible with LPDDR4
Last edited by Intrinsic - on 27 June 2018
