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Forums - Gaming - XBONE having problems with eSRAM yield. Crazy Buttocks confirms.

darkknightkryta on 06 June 2013
drkohler said:
darkknightkryta said:
ethomaz said:

Yeah... you are right... that can happen but that was the worst case scenario... I think MS can fix the things before the release and just have a few months of bad supply.

We can only hope, but it looks like their solution is to downclock.

The clock rate of the gpu part was never stated by AMD/MS. Here is a theory just as good as any other theory (or probably even a better one):

Knowing they had a weaker gpu by design choice than the PS4, they very likely started with a higher clock to offset fewer compute units. When the higher clock caused problems (not with esram yields, there are no yield problems with large numbers of ram banks, ever, due to inbuilt redundancy) , they downclocked to "normal" 800MHz which gives the 1.2Tflops rumoured around. So this whole "downclock" thingie already happened months ago (at the time the whole "yield problem" gossip started popping up - go figure!)

Too lazy to read up, but wasn't the Flop number at 900gf now?  Which is quite paltry.



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ethomaz on 06 June 2013

Major Nelson...

But CBOT again (#TeamCBoaT VS #TeamMN)

no.

pr=$$$ to shil for corps
me=notpaifd fpor anyting 9 ysrs here on gaf, all free and all myo love. gamers and games, noohther.

esram stands, perio.d.

truthfact.


ethomaz on 06 June 2013

lol



Pemalite on 06 June 2013
darkknightkryta said:

Too lazy to read up, but wasn't the Flop number at 900gf now?  Which is quite paltry.


"flops" are a metric or floating point performance, CPU's and GPU's are allot more than just floating point, Integer is just as important.

So stop stressing over how much flops something has. :P




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

darkknightkryta on 06 June 2013
Pemalite said:
darkknightkryta said:

Too lazy to read up, but wasn't the Flop number at 900gf now?  Which is quite paltry.


"flops" are a metric or floating point performance, CPU's and GPU's are allot more than just floating point, Integer is just as important.

So stop stressing over how much flops something has. :P

I know very well what "flops" means.  You're also glossing over the part where it takes more processing power to do non integer calculations.  I mean, most geometry transformations are in floating point numbers.



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Machiavellian on 07 June 2013
drkohler said:
Machiavellian said:
sunK1D said:

This yield rumor is old...
Microsoft has one thing Sony lacks right now and that is CASH. I wouldn't be so quick to discredit them even though I'll be going PS4 next gen.

I believe if MS will have problems meeting demand they could always bring on line another Chip maker. 

No they can't. 28nm lines don't grow on trees. I'm pretty sure that all 28nm lines are running at max capacity or thereabouts. Yes it can be solved with money, but with a lot of, and I mean A LOT OF money, since they basically have to "buy manufacturing plant time" from other contractors.

Yes, it would be a lot of money but it's not like MS is stingy with the cash when they have a plan.  MS has already spent a ton and they need the X1 to succeed so I see the purse strings opening up pretty wide.  On another note, I thought MS went to a 40nm process just because of the complexity of the chip design.



Pemalite on 07 June 2013
darkknightkryta said:

I know very well what "flops" means.  You're also glossing over the part where it takes more processing power to do non integer calculations.  I mean, most geometry transformations are in floating point numbers.


Actually, most of the processing at the start of the graphics rendering pipeline is floating point heavy, not just geometry transformations. - The end of the pipeline is mostly integer heavy, integer math is generally faster, game developers relied more heavily on it towards the end of this generation to extract more performance.

As for my prior point, seems it flew completely over your head.




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

walsufnir on 07 June 2013
Slimebeast said:
This is hilarious.

If it's true like Ethomaz said, that the Xbone APU is more expensive than the PS4 APU and will remain so over the whole generation, and yet the PS4 is 50% more powerful, now that must be seen as a serious engineering failure.

I'm so pissed off. How can they fail so bad?

I want xbone to be able to give PS4 a match, a good fight. Not become laughing stock.

 

It's not the apu, it is the whole chip with APU, memory controller, move units and esram. Of course this is more expensive.



Slimebeast on 07 June 2013
walsufnir said:
Slimebeast said:
This is hilarious.

If it's true like Ethomaz said, that the Xbone APU is more expensive than the PS4 APU and will remain so over the whole generation, and yet the PS4 is 50% more powerful, now that must be seen as a serious engineering failure.

I'm so pissed off. How can they fail so bad?

I want xbone to be able to give PS4 a match, a good fight. Not become laughing stock.

 

It's not the apu, it is the whole chip with APU, memory controller, move units and esram. Of course this is more expensive.

All right, the whole chip.

But it's the same problem - how can something be "of course more expensive" and at the same time weaker than the competition?

What's the benefit of this design decision? That the machine will be able to communicate faster with separate OPs (which makes it fast to switch between different programs, like gaming, Kinect, Skype, TV etc)? That's the only argument I've heard so far.



walsufnir on 07 June 2013
Slimebeast said:
walsufnir said:
Slimebeast said:
This is hilarious.

If it's true like Ethomaz said, that the Xbone APU is more expensive than the PS4 APU and will remain so over the whole generation, and yet the PS4 is 50% more powerful, now that must be seen as a serious engineering failure.

I'm so pissed off. How can they fail so bad?

I want xbone to be able to give PS4 a match, a good fight. Not become laughing stock.

 

It's not the apu, it is the whole chip with APU, memory controller, move units and esram. Of course this is more expensive.

All right, the whole chip.

But it's the same problem - how can something be "of course more expensive" and at the same time weaker than the competition?

What's the benefit of this design decision? That the machine will be able to communicate faster with separate OPs (which makes it fast to switch between different programs, like gaming, Kinect, Skype, TV etc)? That's the only argument I've heard so far.


You are looking at it the wrong way.

$ony and MS started developing their "next-gen" years before, with a goal to achieve, also technically. MS thought it would be a good way to switch to x86 but had good experience with edram in 360 - given that they also have experience in 3d (they build directx) they got specs from amd and together a solution was found to increase bandwidth between apu and ddr3 -> esram. To make it even better (in their view) also Move-units were developped to act as fixed-function-units.

Overall this all adds up - move-units, memory-controller, apu, memory-controller - in one package. It is not "weaker" as you see it. It just integrates more stuff in one package.

What we see here is two different companies with two different ways of implementing a "new gen". After all is said and done it's easy to say "wow, that's crap".