Might Sony go with a two-SKU strategy next-gen (like Microsoft did with Series S)?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

The Ryzen 6000 mobile chips are already dangerously close to the series S in terms of performance (both CPU and GPU) and I'm fairly sure that by 2025, even the PS5 and XSX will be getting in range of AMD's APUs.

Some Ryzen 6000 mobile chips are definitely better than the Series S on the CPU front already.

The 6980HX based on Zen 3+, 3.3Ghz-5Ghz, 16MB L3 cache kinda makes the Series S 3.4-3.6Ghz Zen 2, 8MB L3 seem whimpy by comparison.
Plus the move from Zen 2 to Zen 3 had 19% more performance at the same clock...

Series S has a 20CU/1280 Shader GPU @1.565Ghz fed by 224GB/s of memory bandwidth... Which places it in the same rough ballpark as a GPU sitting just below the Radeon RX 6500XT. (Mostly thanks to Infinity cache and 1ghz higher core clock that is.)

None of AMD's APU's in the PC space have a GPU with the memory bandwidth that can match the Series S... So in order to get "competitive" results you need to cut back on features that gobble up fillrate/memory bandwidth and push up effects that suck up compute time instead.

The Series S is a very low-end device by PC standards... Heck the Xbox Series X/Playstation 5 is mid-range... But that also doesn't say much as the PC high-end has climbed a few tiers (and cost) over the past decade... Does mean we will need mid-cycle refreshes to keep consoles competitive with mid-range PC gaming.

It would be nice if one could install a bog-standard Windows 11 on a Microsoft console with all the appropriate drivers and then benchmark them against a normal PC.

I don't think that the bandwidth is as much of an advantage. I mean, the 1050Ti has about twice the Bandwidth yet is only similar to the performance of the 680m in the 6800H. And while it's a bit limiting on the APU, it's also the reason why there's only 12CU, and why the Phoenix APUs coming in March are also limited to 12CU (and why AMD stuck so long with Vega 8). The 7040 series APUs will also come with 32MiB of L3 cache vs 16 on the 6000 series, which will certainly also alleviate the bottleneck to some degree.

Phoenix will also have more Bandwidth than the 6000 series, which was limited to DDR5-4800 or LPDDR5 of the same speed (linking the 7735 as it's basically a 6900HS refresh, resulting in about 40GB/s). The 7040 will go up to DDR5-5600 or LPDD5-7500 (45GB/s and 60GB/s respectively), reducing the bottleneck, especially with the latter option. Additionally, the GPU clock can go up to 3000 Mhz, though probably not sustainable at that speed.

With all these improvements, I expect the performance improvement of the 780m over the 680m to be ~15-20% with DDR5 and up to 35% (limited by the TDP) for the LPDDR5 variant, which should make it compete with the 1650 or even 1060 - despite them having 2-4 times the bandwidth.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 09 January 2023