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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Nintendo spend $527M in R&D in the FY'15 according to Technavio

Soundwave said:
elektranine said:

That is just an arcticle based on a routine email for those on AMD's mailing list. I've already said that SCE went to AMD for a reference design but they took that reference design and used that to create a new custom APU chip orders of magnitude more powerful and supporting new technologies not found even in AMD's current APU chips.

How does the PS4 APU become 1200% (12x) more powerful than even most high end APUs released in 2013?

How is it that even AMD's newest announced APUs (not even released yet) are still outclassed by the PS4 by over 2x?

All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. Nintendo would have to do the same. But they lack SCE's engineering background. SCE created a whole new architecture, the cell. Nintendo has never done anything quite to that magnitude so they would have to rely on AMD which would largely increase the R&D costs. So spending a few hundred million $ in a single year doesn't really support this happening. More likely Nintendo is taking an AMD retail APU increasing things like clock speed, memory, etc and ending up with something about as powerful as the xbone.

The GameCube was an amazing chip that outperformed Ken Kutaragi's ballyhooed PS2 for $100 less. The CELL was a design disaster which got Ken Kutaragi fired.

The Gamecube came out over 19 months after the PS2 launched. Besides that the PS2 was never designed to have high specs in the first place as it was SCE's first attempt at semi-custom chip design with another company. So its not surprising that the Gamecube is more powerfull in theory as it came out almost 2 years later and Nintendo went for high end specs. But that is only in theory as the PS2 had much higher raw polygon performance (over 2x) and was overall better recieved by developers.

The cell was a disaster? Ah yes, the cell was a complete disaster for SCE I remember now. It was only used in billions of devices, supported by dozens of multi-national multi-billion dollar corporations, used in everything from TV's to consoles to Set top boxes to Blu ray/HD-DVD players, heavily used in research & academia, even used by the military and some super computers. The Cell was SCE's first attempt at co-developing a fully custom computing architecture with other corportations and they learned very important insight & experience they used in the future. It is not really true to say the CELL was a disaster as it was heavily supported and used in many devices. The CELL the was world's first iteration of a non-homogenious computing chip and is the direct forerunner to modern day APUs as seen in the PS4 & xbone. Without the CELL APUs would not exist as many thought that a non-homogenious chip could not be commercially viable. It is also false to say Ken was fired as that never happened. Many like to trump up this lie to say SCE failed but it is only that a lie. It is important to understand japanese culture as with important projects its not uncommon for working men to not take days off or see their family for extended periods of time, sometimes even many years. Ken merely took some extended time off to see his family and deal with family issues. During that time he was & is still employed as a consultant for SCE and in fact was even one of the engineers for the PS4.

AMD does most of the work here really, they make GPUs, if Sony/Nintendo were so good at it they would make their own, but they don't and are well advised to not. 

Actually no AMD does not "make GPUs". You are wrong AMD has not made any GPUs or CPUs for a long time. They are a fab-less chip design & consulting firm now. Why would SCE make their own GPU design that would take decades of R&D not to mention patents & licensing issues. SCE went to AMD and licensed a reference design for their APUs and then substantially modified it with new tech. (This is actually really common in the computing industry. ARM licenses their ARM cpu reference design to the dozens of ARM cpu companies that then heavily customize & manufacture the CPUs for their own applications. ARM doesn't have real intimate knowledge and cannot legally disclose what makes Qualcomm's ARM cpus better to another company, Apple for instance)

The R&D cost of the chip is not really so much the issue. The R&D cost of SOFTWARE development is more the issue nowadays, sure you can have a 3 TFLOP machine. 4 TFLOP. Fuck. Make it 5 TFLOP. 

This shows you have no clear understanding of the computing industry and don't really know. R&D costs will typically outweigh all the manufacturing & marketing costs for a chips useful lifetime. Say you have 1000 highly qualified engineers paying each engineer a modest salary of 150K, thats 150 million a year just for their base salaries. So say a chip takes just 6 years to R&D you are already at nearly $1 billion. Add in the cost of benifits (healthcare, vacation, pension, bonuses, etc) and all the il-liquid material costs (real estate, equipment, prototyping, etc) and any srewups or failures along the way and you will quickly see R&D go up to the billions. Its not uncommon to see a single chip cost $3 billion or more to develop. And can't "make" a chip be XX terraflops as terraflops is a human measure of how powerful a chip is. You can't just throw in more processors as that will increase the chip size which will exponentially decrease the yield rate (%). And there are other things to worry about too such as TDP, watts, bandwidth, etc. (Large firms like Intel have over 10,000 engineers)

The real question is who the hell is going to develop for that and at point does pushing such a chip to its limits basically mean that a developer has to gamble with its future existence? 

So it's this. It's a certain hardware manufacterer telling developers no you can't develop games on more powerfull hardware "we know better". Since when will a dev go bankrupt by developing on more powerful hardware? SCE certainly hasn't and with revenues and profits higher than ever.

The PS4 and XB1 GPUs from my understanding aren't even that different, MS was so butthurt from the RROD on the 360 that they played it probably too safe. It's not like Sony had some magic powder in their chip that only they could create. 

Well your understanding is wrong. Yes both MS and SCE went to AMD and licensed reference designs but thats is where things start to diverge. MS left much of the reference design in place chose only a modest bump in core specs in favor of the whole ESRAM setup. SCE chose to look at where the computing industry will be going in the next few years and add those technologies in such as HSA and hUMA support among others. And not going the esram route allowed SCE to really ramp up the core specs. Fun fact: the SCE APU has smaller chip surface area and had higher yield rates resulting in lower costs than the MS APU while also simultaneously more powerful and having higher bus speeds than the MS APU. I never claimed SCE had some sort of magic power but instead spent many years and billions on R&D. This is also something that Nintendo will also have to do but even more as they lack SCE's engineering experinece with the CELL.



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JWeinCom said:
elektranine said:

That is just an arcticle based on a routine email for those on AMD's mailing list. I've already said that SCE went to AMD for a reference design but they took that reference design and used that to create a new custom APU chip orders of magnitude more powerful and supporting new technologies not found even in AMD's current APU chips.

How does the PS4 APU become 1200% (12x) more powerful than even most high end APUs released in 2013?

How is it that even AMD's newest announced APUs (not even released yet) are still outclassed by the PS4 by over 2x?

All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. Nintendo would have to do the same. But they lack SCE's engineering background. SCE created a whole new architecture, the cell. Nintendo has never done anything quite to that magnitude so they would have to rely on AMD which would largely increase the R&D costs. So spending a few hundred million $ in a single year doesn't really support this happening. More likely Nintendo is taking an AMD retail APU increasing things like clock speed, memory, etc and ending up with something about as powerful as the xbone.

"That is just an arcticle based on a routine email for those on AMD's mailing list. I've already said that SCE went to AMD for a reference design but they took that reference design and used that to create a new custom APU chip orders of magnitude more powerful and supporting new technologies not found even in AMD's current APU chips."

I really don't give a shit what you said, because you seem to be pulling everything directly from your ass.  I have a statement directly from AMD.  Do you have something more reliable to counter that?

The PS4 APU uses fairly standard Jaguar cores for the CPU, and the GPU is based on the Raedon series.  

"IHow does the PS4 APU become 1200% (12x) more powerful than even most high end APUs released in 2013?"

It doesn't.  AMD's figures for the PS4 (which Sony has used) puts the chip at 1.84 tflops.  The richland series, what was available at the time, is put at 744 gflops.  The difference is a little more than 2x not near 12x.  And that's just comparing the GPUs straight up and not accounting for the fact that the CPUs for richland are far more powerful.   

This is not correct. The richland architecture is NOT an APU at all. You cannot compare them. I was only talking about APUs. Richland is just a discrete CPU and a discrete GPU glued together in a single package much like Intel does. The richland "APU" lacks all the features true APUs have such as : heterogenious memory management, full coherence of memory between CPU/GPU, GPU pagable memory, etc. Not quite the same thing here.

And of course, tflops is a, at best, poor stat for comparison as the architecture makes a huge difference.  The jaguar cores were not the best that AMD has, then or now.  They are one of the most energy efficient, which is why they were used.

We live in a post CPU world now. They are not important at all. That's why SCE went with a lower power one. There was once a point where we had seperate math coprocessors and MMUs but you don't hear people chanting about needing more power for those. Pretty soon in the future traditional CPUs will go completely away and the APUs will no longer have CPUs or GPUs just heterogenious core that can execute either CPU or GPU instructions.

"How is it that even AMD's newest announced APUs (not even released yet) are still outclassed by the PS4 by over 2x?"

I doubt they are because it was barely 2x more powerful than the richland series in in 2013.  But, APUs are generally designed to not be particularly strong. The APU is based on the Jaguar architecture which was not their best architecture at the time and now even less so.

Sony's APU is more powerful (debatably), because they're the only ones who have use for a powerful APU.  APUs are designed for ultra books, lightweight laptops, and for budget gamers. They are not made for high quality gaming. Those who are looking to really build a PC rig would opt for two discrete chips.  And even if they were opting for an APU, they probably wouldn't want such a GPU heavy design.  That makes sense for a dedicated gaming device, but it doesn't make sense for a PC that will likely be used for many other things as well.  And of course AMD makes discrete GPUs that trounce the PS4.

 AMD doesn't make more powerful APUs for the mass market because the mass market doesn't really need them... 

Nope. Do you really think AMD would not sell these if they could. Many budget PC gamers would go after a $200 APU with a moderately powerful GPU. Enterprise use would also be huge as many corporation's employees need a capable desktop with good graphics capabilties. 

"All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. Nintendo would have to do the same. But they lack SCE's engineering background. SCE created a whole new architecture, the cell. Nintendo has never done anything quite to that magnitude so they would have to rely on AMD which would largely increase the R&D costs. So spending a few hundred million $ in a single year doesn't really support this happening. More likely Nintendo is taking an AMD retail APU increasing things like clock speed, memory, etc and ending up with something about as powerful as the xbone."

Yeah, you just have no clue what you're talking about.  HSA is a technology that was developed jointly with many companies such as ARM, AMD, Samsung, Media Tech and qualcom.  There is actually an organization called the HSA foundation.  They list their key founders.  Sony is not on that list.  AMD's kaveri line off processors use HSA, as do many other products.  It's not a Sony thing.

http://www.hsafoundation.com/

As for hUMA that's another architecture the Kaveri line supports.  It's also something that has not been confirmed for PS4.   It was originally stated that the PS4 would use it, but AMD later said that was inaccurate.  The kabini line, which is the foundation for the PS4 and XBone processors, does not support Huma.  It is possible that the custom versions do somehow support it, but that has not been confirmed.

Nope again. SCE has been a member of the HSA group for years. I never said that it was some sort of SCE exclusive tech. And the PS4 APU uses Kaveri as its reference design NOT the kabini.

As for the cell, ye they created the cell.  It cost them 400 million.  About 1/7 of what you are claiming they spent to modify an existing AMD chip.  And... you just said that AMD can't use any of the special knowledge they gained from the development of the PS4 chip, and now you're saying it was Sony simply building on AMD's work... 

Actually the CELL was co-developed by SCE and IBM and Toshiba. SCE's share of the cost was $400 million. So that puts the total cost at $1.2 billion. Much of the cost SCE endured with the APU is the licensing of the patents & trademarks coming with the APU reference design. Dozens of tech companies cross-license patents like this and that builds the cost up. Patents from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ATI, etc.

And Nintendo is very unliely to do anything like increase clockspeed.  The PS4 GPU clock speed is slightly lower than the XBox GPU, and is about standard for AMD APUs.  Its CPU on the other hand is clocked at a very low speed, about 1/3 of what is available on modern apus.  

Actually nope again. SCE has never said anything about their clockspeeds. That is all under NDA and not even AMD can legally say anything about it.

Do you have anything to back up anything you're saying?  Do you have something show how much sony's gaming division spent on R&D?  Anything to show that PS4's APU is 12x more powerful than the APUs of the time?  Anything to show how much it would cost to develop a chip like the PS4's?  Anything to show the details of Sony and AMD's deal?  Because it seems like everything you've said is coming directly from your ass.  And while I don't mean to offend your ass, it doesn't seem like a very reliable source.



elektranine said:
JWeinCom said:

"That is just an arcticle based on a routine email for those on AMD's mailing list. I've already said that SCE went to AMD for a reference design but they took that reference design and used that to create a new custom APU chip orders of magnitude more powerful and supporting new technologies not found even in AMD's current APU chips."

I really don't give a shit what you said, because you seem to be pulling everything directly from your ass.  I have a statement directly from AMD.  Do you have something more reliable to counter that?

The PS4 APU uses fairly standard Jaguar cores for the CPU, and the GPU is based on the Raedon series.  

"IHow does the PS4 APU become 1200% (12x) more powerful than even most high end APUs released in 2013?"

It doesn't.  AMD's figures for the PS4 (which Sony has used) puts the chip at 1.84 tflops.  The richland series, what was available at the time, is put at 744 gflops.  The difference is a little more than 2x not near 12x.  And that's just comparing the GPUs straight up and not accounting for the fact that the CPUs for richland are far more powerful.   

This is not correct. The richland architecture is NOT an APU at all. You cannot compare them. I was only talking about APUs. Richland is just a discrete CPU and a discrete GPU glued together in a single package much like Intel does. The richland "APU" lacks all the features true APUs have such as : heterogenious memory management, full coherence of memory between CPU/GPU, GPU pagable memory, etc. Not quite the same thing here.

And of course, tflops is a, at best, poor stat for comparison as the architecture makes a huge difference.  The jaguar cores were not the best that AMD has, then or now.  They are one of the most energy efficient, which is why they were used.

We live in a post CPU world now. They are not important at all. That's why SCE went with a lower power one. There was once a point where we had seperate math coprocessors and MMUs but you don't hear people chanting about needing more power for those. Pretty soon in the future traditional CPUs will go completely away and the APUs will no longer have CPUs or GPUs just heterogenious core that can execute either CPU or GPU instructions.

"How is it that even AMD's newest announced APUs (not even released yet) are still outclassed by the PS4 by over 2x?"

I doubt they are because it was barely 2x more powerful than the richland series in in 2013.  But, APUs are generally designed to not be particularly strong. The APU is based on the Jaguar architecture which was not their best architecture at the time and now even less so.

Sony's APU is more powerful (debatably), because they're the only ones who have use for a powerful APU.  APUs are designed for ultra books, lightweight laptops, and for budget gamers. They are not made for high quality gaming. Those who are looking to really build a PC rig would opt for two discrete chips.  And even if they were opting for an APU, they probably wouldn't want such a GPU heavy design.  That makes sense for a dedicated gaming device, but it doesn't make sense for a PC that will likely be used for many other things as well.  And of course AMD makes discrete GPUs that trounce the PS4.

 AMD doesn't make more powerful APUs for the mass market because the mass market doesn't really need them... 

Nope. Do you really think AMD would not sell these if they could. Many budget PC gamers would go after a $200 APU with a moderately powerful GPU. Enterprise use would also be huge as many corporation's employees need a capable desktop with good graphics capabilties. 

"All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. Nintendo would have to do the same. But they lack SCE's engineering background. SCE created a whole new architecture, the cell. Nintendo has never done anything quite to that magnitude so they would have to rely on AMD which would largely increase the R&D costs. So spending a few hundred million $ in a single year doesn't really support this happening. More likely Nintendo is taking an AMD retail APU increasing things like clock speed, memory, etc and ending up with something about as powerful as the xbone."

Yeah, you just have no clue what you're talking about.  HSA is a technology that was developed jointly with many companies such as ARM, AMD, Samsung, Media Tech and qualcom.  There is actually an organization called the HSA foundation.  They list their key founders.  Sony is not on that list.  AMD's kaveri line off processors use HSA, as do many other products.  It's not a Sony thing.

http://www.hsafoundation.com/

As for hUMA that's another architecture the Kaveri line supports.  It's also something that has not been confirmed for PS4.   It was originally stated that the PS4 would use it, but AMD later said that was inaccurate.  The kabini line, which is the foundation for the PS4 and XBone processors, does not support Huma.  It is possible that the custom versions do somehow support it, but that has not been confirmed.

Nope again. SCE has been a member of the HSA group for years. I never said that it was some sort of SCE exclusive tech. And the PS4 APU uses Kaveri as its reference design NOT the kabini.

As for the cell, ye they created the cell.  It cost them 400 million.  About 1/7 of what you are claiming they spent to modify an existing AMD chip.  And... you just said that AMD can't use any of the special knowledge they gained from the development of the PS4 chip, and now you're saying it was Sony simply building on AMD's work... 

Actually the CELL was co-developed by SCE and IBM and Toshiba. SCE's share of the cost was $400 million. So that puts the total cost at $1.2 billion. Much of the cost SCE endured with the APU is the licensing of the patents & trademarks coming with the APU reference design. Dozens of tech companies cross-license patents like this and that builds the cost up. Patents from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ATI, etc.

And Nintendo is very unliely to do anything like increase clockspeed.  The PS4 GPU clock speed is slightly lower than the XBox GPU, and is about standard for AMD APUs.  Its CPU on the other hand is clocked at a very low speed, about 1/3 of what is available on modern apus.  

Actually nope again. SCE has never said anything about their clockspeeds. That is all under NDA and not even AMD can legally say anything about it.

Do you have anything to back up anything you're saying?  Do you have something show how much sony's gaming division spent on R&D?  Anything to show that PS4's APU is 12x more powerful than the APUs of the time?  Anything to show how much it would cost to develop a chip like the PS4's?  Anything to show the details of Sony and AMD's deal?  Because it seems like everything you've said is coming directly from your ass.  And while I don't mean to offend your ass, it doesn't seem like a very reliable source.

"This is not correct. The richland architecture is NOT an APU at all. You cannot compare them. I was only talking about APUs. Richland is just a discrete CPU and a discrete GPU glued together in a single package much like Intel does. The richland "APU" lacks all the features true APUs have such as : heterogenious memory management, full coherence of memory between CPU/GPU, GPU pagable memory, etc. Not quite the same thing here."

You would be right... except that you're wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113335

The APUs AMD made originally used the "fusion" branding.  After a copyright dispute, they began to call it HSA.  Same concept.  Obviously the earlier models didn't do memory sharing and communication as well, but they were most certainly APUs.  So... as it seems with most things you've said, you are wrong.

"Nope. Do you really think AMD would not sell these if they could. Many budget PC gamers would go after a $200 APU with a moderately powerful GPU. Enterprise use would also be huge as many corporation's employees need a capable desktop with good graphics capabilties. "

No I don't think they would.  Because it's a computer not a console.  So it wouldn't make sense to buy something made for a console.  It also wouldn't make much sense to put mobile chips in a desktop, because those are made with different things in mind.  

For between 250 and 300 dollars you could get an i3 processor and a mid range desktop gpu.  You can get a lot more bang for your buck, especially since some of the features of the PS4 may not be relevant to a PC, and especially not for a desktop.  

"Nope again. SCE has been a member of the HSA group for years. I never said that it was some sort of SCE exclusive tech. And the PS4 APU uses Kaveri as its reference design NOT the kabini."

Wrong on the Kaveri. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/171375-reverse-engineered-ps4-apu-reveals-the-consoles-real-cpu-and-gpu-specs

As for You saying it's exclusive text. Lets take a look at the replay shall we?

"All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. "

You said that HSA is not found in AMD's retail lineup.  That is absolutely false.  You also said they do not have the rights to manufacture it.  You said Sony's PS4 uses hUMA which as far as I can tell is false.  The clear implication is that they couldn't use HUMA because it was a custom Sony feature.  Maybe I misunderstood that last one, but the first three are absolutely, demonstrably wrong.

As for being a member of the HSA foundation... Again, wrong, so far as I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:HSA_Foundation_members

Wikipedia may not be completely accurate, but I can't find any source claiming Sony is an HSA foundation member.  At any rate, that's pretty irrelevant to the point.  The point was you said that AMD cannot manufacture them.  Not only can they do so, but many other companies can as well.  So, yeah. Wrong.

Actually nope again. SCE has never said anything about their clockspeeds. That is all under NDA and not even AMD can legally say anything about it.

Wrong again.  

https://plus.google.com/+sonyuk/posts/eiA6sDQvWwQ

Actually the CELL was co-developed by SCE and IBM and Toshiba. SCE's share of the cost was $400 million. So that puts the total cost at $1.2 billion. Much of the cost SCE endured with the APU is the licensing of the patents & trademarks coming with the APU reference design. Dozens of tech companies cross-license patents like this and that builds the cost up. Patents from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ATI, etc.

Yet again wrong.  The claim in the book (The Race for a New Game Machine) claims the project cost Sony and their partners five years and 400 million dollars. Not just Sony.  

I'll ask again.  Do you have any sort of evidence whatsoever to back up anything you're saying?  Because pretty much everything I've looked into has turned up false.  You clearly don't know what you're talking about.  If you think you do, then back up what you're saying.



JWeinCom said:
elektranine said:

"This is not correct. The richland architecture is NOT an APU at all. You cannot compare them. I was only talking about APUs. Richland is just a discrete CPU and a discrete GPU glued together in a single package much like Intel does. The richland "APU" lacks all the features true APUs have such as : heterogenious memory management, full coherence of memory between CPU/GPU, GPU pagable memory, etc. Not quite the same thing here."

You would be right... except that you're wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113335

The APUs AMD made originally used the "fusion" branding.  After a copyright dispute, they began to call it HSA.  Same concept.  Obviously the earlier models didn't do memory sharing and communication as well, but they were most certainly APUs.  So... as it seems with most things you've said, you are wrong.

(So a wikipedia page and an online PC part retailer wow! The APU is a concept not a marketing term. And HSA has nothing to do with fusion at all as fusion was a marketing brand used by AMD to market their predecessor to the APUs while HSA is a standard co-developed by dozens of different companies.

In order to be a APU a chip must have the following:

1)CPU & GPU on the same die

2) CPU & GPU can directly communicate

3) Heterogenious memory mapping

4) CPU memory pagable from GPU using GPU pointers

5) GPU pagable from CPU using CPU pointers

6) Both CPU & GPU are fully aware of each other and can access each others variables without delay & know what eachother are doing at all times.

The richland architecture has none of that:

1) CPU on single die

2) GPU on another die

3) CPU & GPU dies integrated together on a chip package

4) does not support heterogenious memory mapping

5) CPU does not know GPU exists & GPU does not know CPU exists. Each runs in their own world runnig their own seperate tasks not working together.

Richland is just a something AMD tried to pass off as a newer tech but isn't. Other companies like Intel have also doen this before where they have a new product line and try to sell the older products under the new product line's branding.

)

"Nope. Do you really think AMD would not sell these if they could. Many budget PC gamers would go after a $200 APU with a moderately powerful GPU. Enterprise use would also be huge as many corporation's employees need a capable desktop with good graphics capabilties. "

No I don't think they would.  Because it's a computer not a console.  So it wouldn't make sense to buy something made for a console.  It also wouldn't make much sense to put mobile chips in a desktop, because those are made with different things in mind.  

For between 250 and 300 dollars you could get an i3 processor and a mid range desktop gpu.  You can get a lot more bang for your buck, especially since some of the features of the PS4 may not be relevant to a PC, and especially not for a desktop.  

(Except that the PS4 APU would still outperform that setup and the APU only costs about $30 to manufacture so the $200 was a really high mark. They could sell this for $99-$130 and still make a killing.)

"Nope again. SCE has been a member of the HSA group for years. I never said that it was some sort of SCE exclusive tech. And the PS4 APU uses Kaveri as its reference design NOT the kabini."

Wrong on the Kaveri. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/171375-reverse-engineered-ps4-apu-reveals-the-consoles-real-cpu-and-gpu-specs

(Extremetech is not a reliable source as they have from day 1 tried to downplay everything related to Playstation 4. Sorry that's like using fox news or wikepedia as a source.)

As for You saying it's exclusive text. Lets take a look at the replay shall we?

"All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. "

You said that HSA is not found in AMD's retail lineup.  That is absolutely false.  You also said they do not have the rights to manufacture it.  You said Sony's PS4 uses hUMA which as far as I can tell is false.  The clear implication is that they couldn't use HUMA because it was a custom Sony feature.  Maybe I misunderstood that last one, but the first three are absolutely, demonstrably wrong.

(Actually no there is no retail AMD part that has a full HSA & hUMA setup.

HSA/hUMA requires the following:

1)APU compliant with both HSA & hUMA standards

2)System memory array that is a homogenious pool with sufficient bandwidth to support caching of data. Xbone cant do this

3)An operating system that is fully compliant and support HSA memory access by system software 

HSA/hUMA is not just an APU thing it requires special infrastructure both, hardware & software, to actually implement it. There is no motherboards that support this and windows/linux would have to be rewritten to properly support this new type of memory access. So I am still correct when I say there is no retail HSA/hUMA yet.

)

As for being a member of the HSA foundation... Again, wrong, so far as I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:HSA_Foundation_members

Wikipedia may not be completely accurate, but I can't find any source claiming Sony is an HSA foundation member.  At any rate, that's pretty irrelevant to the point.  The point was you said that AMD cannot manufacture them.  Not only can they do so, but many other companies can as well.  So, yeah. Wrong.

(The articles are really easy to find on google you must not be looking hard enough. SCE is not a founding member but they are still one of the main contributing members.)

Actually nope again. SCE has never said anything about their clockspeeds. That is all under NDA and not even AMD can legally say anything about it.

Wrong again.  

https://plus.google.com/+sonyuk/posts/eiA6sDQvWwQ

(SonyUK has nothing to do with SCE, besides the PS4 was mainly developed in SCEA so its highly unlikely a foreign branch of your parent company is gonna have much intimate knowledge on the PS4. Google plus is hardly an official source for anything. I was talking about official press releases or announcements or maybe even official SCE FB or twitter pages not something so remote as an unverified 'SonyUK' google plus page.)

Actually the CELL was co-developed by SCE and IBM and Toshiba. SCE's share of the cost was $400 million. So that puts the total cost at $1.2 billion. Much of the cost SCE endured with the APU is the licensing of the patents & trademarks coming with the APU reference design. Dozens of tech companies cross-license patents like this and that builds the cost up. Patents from AMD, Intel, Nvidia, ATI, etc.

Yet again wrong.  The claim in the book (The Race for a New Game Machine) claims the project cost Sony and their partners five years and 400 million dollars. Not just Sony.  

(Actually that book was highly critisized on release for having factual incorrect statements and sensationalism. The authors needed to sell book so they took massive liberties with the truth and tried to create fake scandels like "SCE paid for MS's Xbox 360 cpu dev costs" etc. Not the best source at all. I thought you had some other source for the $400 million so in retrospect the CELL development costs were even more.)

I'll ask again.  Do you have any sort of evidence whatsoever to back up anything you're saying?  Because pretty much everything I've looked into has turned up false.  You clearly don't know what you're talking about.  If you think you do, then back up what you're saying.

(I am not doing your work for you as I was merely pointing out that you were incorrect. You can be rest assured that I have sustantial knowledge in this subject matter and "know what I am talking about". Your original post did not have any sources and I just pointed out the incorrectness. You made the original assertions so it is you who has to prove them to be correct, I should not have to prove them incorrect.)



The answers within quotes are fucking painful to read in this thread, well.... okay they're painful to read for 2 reasons but the formatting of the back and forth here is tough on the eyes.

On top of that, if there is no source to what people are saying here, then everyone will naturally and correctly assume that the source is the head of the person writing it with no basis outside of that, you can't just drop a statement filled with questionable facts to back it up and then claim the reason it is true is "because you know so" that doesn't work anywhere outside of a school playground really.



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Around the Network
jason1637 said:
elektranine said:
Meanwhile PlayStation spends billions.
Just the APU was over 3 billion to develop.
If the numbers are true for Nintendo then I wouldn't expect the NX to be radically different than their previous console attempts. Sony spent over 6 billion on the PS4 project so half a billion is really a drop in the bucket.
So as I predicted before the NX is only going to be a moderate upgrade over the Wii U just like the Wii U - Wii upgrade before it.

How much a company spends on a console doesnt really determine how successful it will be.

Look at the wii.

Also we don't know how much the spent on the NX. We only know that 627m was spent on r&d in 2015.

In addition the billions where spread across the 7 or so years that the PS3 was out since development for the next console starts once the previous one is released.



elektranine said:
JWeinCom said:

Guys can we both cut it down a bit - thread is getting unreadable for anyone else.

Cheers.



starcraft - Playing Games = FUN, Talking about Games = SERIOUS

elektranine said:

I'll just make a list to make the format easier.

1. http://techreport.com/review/24954/amd-a10-6800k-and-a10-6700-richland-apus-reviewed

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7028/amd-richland-desktop-apus-now-available

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-6700-a10-6800k-richland-review,3528.html*

http://wccftech.com/amd-apu-performance-numbers-revealed-details-launch-schedule-richland-kabini-apus-leaked/

http://wccftech.com/amd-apu-performance-numbers-revealed-details-launch-schedule-richland-kabini-apus-leaked/*

http://www.alphr.com/amd/amd-richland/32256/amd-richland-review

These are just a few of the sites that refer to richland as an APU.  I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on the subject, but I'm also not going to believe that you are.  I will however believe every website I've seen about Richland which refers to the line as APUs. You can tell me it's not, but I don't care unless you can show me a source that makes the same claim, because you don't get to decide on your own what is or is not an APU.  You're asserting that Richland is not an APU despite everyone else labeling it as such.  So, back up that assertion.

So far as I can tell, no APU that existed in 2013 meets your criteria for being an APU.  In which case, your claim that the PS4 is 12x more powerful or whatever is completely nonsensical.  What were you comparing the PS4 to?

2.  I don't care if you don't like extreme tech.  Look over the sites I gave you, the starred ones.  They will explain that the Kabani line uses Jaguar cores.  The PS4, as confirmed by Sony and AMD, also uses Jaguar cores.  As for Kaveri...

http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-apu-architecture-detailed-generation-apu-featuring-steamroller-gcn-cores/

http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-steamroller-performance-revealed-integor-point-results-show-viable-competition-haswell/

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2014/01/14/amd-a8-7600-kaveri-review/2

The Kaveri line uses Steamroller cores.  So, the PS4 is clearly based on Kabani and not Kaveri.  Incidentally, the Kabani line does not support HUMA.  It's possible that the ps4 has some customization to allow that but that isn't confirmed.

3.  Speaking of Kaveri, Kaveri utilizes HSA/HUMA

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k/6

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-a8-7600-apu-review,3.html

http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-Kaveri-APU-Highlights-Part-2-hUMA-Allows-Both-CPU-and-GPU-Direct-Access-to-32-GB-RAM-416786.shtml

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/154547-amds-next-gen-apu-unifies-cpugpu-memory-should-appear-in-kaveri-xbox-720-ps4

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/AMD-HSA-hUMA-APU,22324.html

http://www.eteknix.com/complete-amd-kaveri-review-a10-7850k-a10-7700k-a8-7600/

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/AMDs-Unified-Memory-Mehr-Performance-und-Energieeffizienz-fuer-Kaveri-und-Co-1850975.html

http://www.custompcreview.com/news/ces-2014-amd-launches-kaveri-apu/19831/

https://www.profesionalreview.com/2013/07/09/caracteristicas-amd-kaveri-cpu-y-huma-parte-i/

http://techreport.com/news/24737/amd-sheds-light-on-kaveri-uniform-memory-architecture

I doubt all of those websites are biased liars :).

So, even though you tried to alter your original claim, it's still dead wrong.  AMD uses both technologies.  The PS4 has not been confirmed to use HUMA.

While we're on the subject, according to AMD, the chip is all their intellectual property.

Everything that Sony has shared in that single chip is AMD [intellectual property], but we have not built an APU quite like that for anyone else in the market.

http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2013/02/26/amd-talks-ps4-it-is-by-far-the-most-powerful-apu-we-have-built-to-date-we-have-not-built-an-apu-quite-like-that-for-anyone-else/

What does software support have to do with anything?  Your point was that the technologies were developed and owned by Sony and therefore were not able to be implemented in any AMD chips.  But, it absolutely is included in the Kaveri line.  Whether or not any computers can actually run it, AMD obviously has the rights to utilize it in their chips, which makes it unlikely that Sony spent 3 billion dollars developing tech they wouldn't fully own and have no real use for outside the PS4.

All that being said, Open CL is available on Linux and Windows, and allows usage of HSA/hUMA.


5.  If they were looking for sensationalism, wouldn't they claim that the Cell cost more than 400 million?  If it was 400 million, and you're saying billions, that is actually the opposite of sensationalism.  So, if you're saying the book is sensationalizing things, then the actual figure for cell development should be considerably less than that.

But hey, if you don't like my source for 400 million fine.  Why should I believe your figure with no evidence?

6.  Ummmmm... no... I wasn't the one who made the original assertion.  Look back two pages if you don't believe me.  I was responding to your assertions that the PS4 cost 6 billion to develop with 3 billion going to the processor.  

So since it's the job of the person who makes the assertion to verify them, please verify your assertions :).



There is a pretty deafening sound of silence in this thread now, but JweinCom just gonna acknowledge the time you put into the above post in case you think it went unread, appreciate the links to why you've come to understand the PS4s development the way you do and the ownership of the APU technologies within the version inside the PS4, anyone could see I think that it could never amount to 15x greater cost of development of the CELL as being suggested above.

Again just said I'd post a "thanks for spending the time on that" post! was a good read.



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Ganoncrotch said:
There is a pretty deafening sound of silence in this thread now, but JweinCom just gonna acknowledge the time you put into the above post in case you think it went unread, appreciate the links to why you've come to understand the PS4s development the way you do and the ownership of the APU technologies within the version inside the PS4, anyone could see I think that it could never amount to 15x greater cost of development of the CELL as being suggested above.

Again just said I'd post a "thanks for spending the time on that" post! was a good read.

Thanks.  Nice to be appreciated.  I take it way too seriously when people are wrong on the internet... lol.