drkohler said:
Let me explain my "waaay too expensive" bit a little further. First of all, "expensive" in the technological sense does not only mean $ spent, it also means power required (when chip designers talk, they usually think of the second part solely). Chiplets come into play when you think in terms of a "construction kit" kind of building a whole series of systems. Depending on what the target is, you add chiplets to your designs until you reach your goal. If you have a goal in your mind like "Different (amounts of) cpus interact with different (amounts of) gpus", then chiplets is the future way to go, no question about that. A console has one single goal, and one single goal only. It is the exact opposite of a "construction kit". It consists of a single set of masks for an SoC or apu, whatever you want to call its core piece. Any set of masks is a very expensive thing to calculate and manufacture, so you want to get away with as few sets as possible. Now if you propose to make separate dies on an interposer, or even worse, separate on the mobo, the first thing is you need to have is three sets of masks. One for the cpu, one for the i/o (a rather simple set though), and one for the gpu. Notice in a console, none of those mask sets are off-the-shelf things, as all three dies are custom tailored. So on the $ spent side, we are already worse off with separate dies (we leave out the interposer thingie which also addds costs). Next is the fact that an i/o chiplet is just that, a thingie that basically has tranceivers that can send/receive data to/from the other chiplets. That thingie needs power to work. If you put your chiplets completely separate on the mobo, you can save the interposer, but you need a much more powerful i/o chip - as soon as you go "outside" of a chip, your tranceivers require a lot of power. Simply put: More distance=more power required. Short summary: a single SoC requires less power than a chiplet design, is easier to "maintain consistency", and all things considered costs less to make (even if there might be a small redundancy loss when you have to toss away an entire chip if either cpu or less likely the gpu part malfunctions). It will be interesting to see what's in store in a few years if there is another generation of consoles. I think we will likely still see SoCs with lots of coprocessors in them. Unless AMD starts building "coprocessor chiplets", something like i/o combined with Sonys ssd/Tempest coprocessors, and other yet to be invented sutff. |
I get that it wouldn't only be positives by to going to chiplets.
While we don't know for certain, it's heavily rumored that the reason the 'next gen' XB's are called "Series", is because they will be a series of hardware. XBSX and 'XBSS', and perhaps more at some point in time. If this was/is the case, then why would MS build an APU for the XBSX, unless the 'XBSS' was just a slightly cut down version of it? The rumors don't suggest that at all.
Yet on the other hand, as far as we know, the PS5 will be the sole console, at least until a Pro version later down the line probably. Now it could be an APU, but there seem to be signs that it could possibly be chiplet based, which would have it's positives but also negatives.
If this were to be the case, it would be backwards based on what you've said. Even if PS5 is a typical APU after all, then the question would remain as to why MS wouldn't use chiplets for a series of consoles, if that's actually the case.
Considering how often MS and SNY create the same general type of networks, services, consoles, etc, if MS is really launching a mid range and upper tier console, then it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for SNY to do the same. Especially if one of the brands are using chiplets, and even more so if the design is as future proof as it can be for later upgrade models.
AMD themselves also sell lower end APU's as well as lower end CPU's and GPU's. Why wouldn't AMD just have one or the other for general consumers? CPU + GPU only or APU only. It's not like AMD can't make worthy APU's considering what they've started with as to the Ryzen G Series. They made some pretty decent ones for the present gen consoles, as well as a beast for XBSX, though we've yet to see that one in action just yet.
Last edited by EricHiggin - on 29 May 2020
