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vg247-PS4: new kits shipping now, AMD A10 used as base, final version next summer

I doubt it. Changing the design of the hardware this late would compromise end of 2013 release date, as that would bring new challenge in terms of board complexity and could compromise yields.



I doubt that part is right. That would mean they are only manufacturing final hardware 4 months before release? Doesn't seem plausible.

in the past, final dev kits have always been late.

even for something like the gamecube.
 

androvsky

Member
Oh okay. I only ask because I keep reading what a waste it is to use GDDR5 for the OS. I'm guessing Sony knows this and would think of something else.

I've gotten into this discussion before, but are you talking about non-gaming apps when you say OS, or are you talking about the actual OS? If you're talking about the operating system, you want that on the fastest RAM and CPU the system has, because games are constantly talking to it. Put the OS in a separate, slower area, and it'll slow down everything else in addition to making the system vastly more complex.

Putting apps in separate RAM would be okay, but it'd still make the system more complex and expensive. Besides, the Vita can do a lot in ~128 MB of reserved RAM, including running a halfway decent HTML5 browser.
 
Why? Since when have devkits been finalized months and months before launch? PS3 and 360 had "PC" dev kits up until a month before launch.

Sony had PS3 final dev kits in may, true, but we were talking about completely new tech. Xbox 360 was worse than that, but obviously it reflected poorly in their launch hardware. They clearly needed more time.

Both suffered terrible shortages didn't they? Hell specially Sony, 200.000 units for PS3 launch in North America...and they only released it in Europe in 2007.

I stand by my reasoning.

in the past, final dev kits have always been late.

even for something like the gamecube.

Well I certainly believe final dev kits will come way earlier this time around, but we will see. Wii U final dev kits came in January for example.
 

Globox_82

Banned
You're cherry-picking what you want to hear to make a case you want to be true. I said third parties talked to Sony. Sometimes publicly. What I implied was that an internal team at Sony made a specific case to higher-ups about the memory in the system, which was not 4GB a year ago. Or even six months ago.

Also, if you're living your life on the idea that the Vita isn't one of the biggest disasters of Sony's time in the console space, then I don't know that you can be reasoned with.



360 devkits arrived in august before launch.

Maybe you mixed my comment with someone else. I never said anything about Vita. I don't care about Vita just to be clear.

BTW You seem to be loosing your composure in a last few days....
 
Sony had PS3 final dev kits in may, true, but we were talking about completely new tech. Xbox 360 was worse than that, but obviously it reflected poorly in their launch hardware. They clearly needed more time.

Both suffered terrible shortages didn't they? Hell specially Sony, 200.000 units for PS3 launch in North America...and they only released it in Europe in 2007.

I stand by my reasoning.

Their designs might be finalized, but it doesn't mean they get the final dev kit this month.
 
Their designs might be finalized, but it doesn't mean they get the final dev kit this month.

Well I'm speculating of course. But the Wii U as I said had final kits in January. I'm guessing March to be the very latest for final dev kits. If they do the same as last gen, supply issues to go around.
 
Well, actually there is. Rambus make money off of PS3. Heck it's their only money making machine. PS3 is at the end of its life cycle, if they don't have a design win in the PS4, then the outlook of the company doesn't look so good, especially with their reputation.

Whatever we say, Sony got the performance they were looking for in XDR, and of course they must have had talks already with Rambus for the PS4, because they must have negotiated lower prices every time Sony lowered the manufacturing price of the ps3.

I'm guessing things didn't turn out so well for Rambus this time if they were looking for the same kinda deal, as Sony probably can't bleed money like before.

Rambus makes a bulk of their money from their patent litigations, they still accrue monies from those patents and will for quite some time. You have to remember that Rambus is a fabless technology company they make money on the design of memory but they don't actually manufacture any memory, so regardless of what their memory is based on. You're always going to be paying Rambus for the design then have to turn around and pay a company to manufacture it that's two payments to separate companies. Rambus also wouldn't have to lower the price of XDR for Sony. Sony wouldn't have much say in negotiating price reduction in the deal. Once Sony selected Rambus they were stuck. They couldn't drop XDR from cell for something else as it'd just cause developers much headache. So whatever price Rambus asked for Sony would have to pay regardless of PS3's price coming down.

Rambus will always be more expensive than any other form of memory. As I stated with my previous example of DDR3 price versus XDR2/3 it'll always apply. Let continue using the fictional price of $5 for a 256MB chip of DDR3 and let's say a 256MB GDDR5 chip goes for $8 a pop, that $5/$8 figure is derived from how much it would cost to manufacture via Samsung, Hynix, etc. So say Sony goes with Rambus and they buy the design for XDR3. Since Rambus doesn't do any manufacturing Sony would have to pay Rambus, let's say Rambus is nice and only asks for $6 per chip (because again this is the only way Rambus would make a profit in this transation). Okay Sony is paying them $6, then Sony has to take these designs to a manufacturer who's going to charge $5 since it's based on DDR3 and probably extra because despite the fact it's using DDR3 it's still not DDR3. So say another $1 just to be low and fair. So now Sony is paying $12 per chip versus $8 for GDDR5, that's a pretty big difference in price. Rambus realizes the worth of their technology and they've never been shy about pricing it accordingly (See Intel's use of RDRAM, the cost of XDR in PS3 compared to GDDR3).
 

Ashes

Banned
Nah, Rambus must have negotiated lower prices, no way Sony reduced hardware prices with the ram *still* being amongst the most costly thing, because Sony were supposedly stuck with them. That conjecture is off I think.

edit: On that note, I still don't think Rambus is a realistic proposition; I'm more convinced of the 2.5d route.
 
Maybe you mixed my comment with someone else. I never said anything about Vita. I don't care about Vita just to be clear.

BTW You seem to be loosing your composure in a last few days....

i never understood why people are taking aegies word as gospel to be quite honest. a guy that worked for teamxbox and went to work on polygon, a site funded by microsoft, is telling us he doesn't seem to be hearing much of ps4? i believe even proelite works for MS. i mean, who's to say they're wrong or right, but come on people, try not to take everyting you read on the internet so seriously.
 

antic604

Banned
Sony first/second party exclusives have sold 75+ million on the PS3. They're far from not selling "particularly well".

You sure that's correct? Last time I've heard (reliably) there was 70m PS3s sold worldwide and one would think people would buy at least few system exclusives. I myself have some 20 PS3-exclusive games (out of 25 games total) and I don't think I'm alone here?
 
i never understood why people are taking aegies word as gospel to be quite honest. a guy that worked for teamxbox and went to work on polygon, a site funded by microsoft, is telling us he doesn't seem to be hearing much of ps4? i believe even proelite works for MS. i mean, who's to say they're wrong or right, but come on people, try not to take everyting you read on the internet so seriously.

Well even if all that is true The Verge seems to like Apple pretty much - at least one of the editors at the unveilling of some iPad "shed tears of joy" that doesn't go well with you theory. I did not read a single article on polygon so I can't tell anything about the people working there. I read posts by aegis here and I wouldn't say he is biased towards MS but better informed/interested.
 
i never understood why people are taking aegies word as gospel to be quite honest. a guy that worked for teamxbox and went to work on polygon, a site funded by microsoft, is telling us he doesn't seem to be hearing much of ps4? i believe even proelite works for MS. i mean, who's to say they're wrong or right, but come on people, try not to take everyting you read on the internet so seriously.

What's wrong with him saying he hadn't heard much about PS4 yet? Why does that make what he's heard about the new Xbox unreliable? He hasn't really said anything that outlandish about the next Xbox, it's been pretty similar to what GAF's other rumour guys have said. These discussions will surely deteriorate if things continue to get personal and petty.
 

Globox_82

Banned
Well even if all that is true The Verge seems to like Apple pretty much - at least one of the editors at the unveilling of some iPad "shed tears of joy" that doesn't go well with you theory. I did not read a single article on polygon so I can't tell anything about the people working there. I read posts by aegis here and I wouldn't say he is biased towards MS but better informed/interested.

tumblr_m4rl4bOkrq1qc9j0w_large.gif
 

Mindlog

Member
Source:
Ram X > Y = fine
Flops X > Y = fine
Accoutrements X > Y = fine
Certain Conditions Y ≥ X = Now hold on! Let's take a step and examine the source. For all we know the source has been tainted by years of indoctrination. This rebel rabble can not be tolerated. But all collected data has yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent in doing that. And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.


We're getting close now.
 

If we were talking about a guy coming up with a bunch of reasons why Sony is going to deliver an underpowered system and MS an overpowered system (Like a bunch of people do, for either way) then I would understand your reaction.

Doesn't hold much water in this situation, since apparently his only sin is that he isn't saying PS4 will be more powerful than Xbox next...

Source:
Ram X > Y = fine
Flops X > Y = fine
Accoutrements X > Y = fine
Certain Conditions Y ≥ X = Now hold on! Let's take a step and examine the source. For all we know the source has been tainted by years of indoctrination. This rebel rabble can not be tolerated. But all collected data has yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent in doing that. And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.


We're getting close now.

.
 
Well even if all that is true The Verge seems to like Apple pretty much - at least one of the editors at the unveilling of some iPad "shed tears of joy" that doesn't go well with you theory. I did not read a single article on polygon so I can't tell anything about the people working there. I read posts by aegis here and I wouldn't say he is biased towards MS but better informed/interested.

from the whole microsoft funding to regurgitating that whole halo4 pizza hut thing pr (i thought they were going to be different), deleting comments and whatnot, it's a shitty site just as the other ones. imo, don't bother with it.
i guess you might be right about the whole thing, then again, gaming journalism is a joke to me, truly the worst thing about this industry and pretty much the reason i stick to gaf for news. there's a reason ppl post the old "gaf->internet->gaf" phrase in a lot of threads.

also, i'm not saying he's "biased", more like these people have links to the competing company, yet people are taking their words as some kind of holy bible about the ps4. i mean, to me, that feels kinda weird. it's kinda like going to a mercedes stand and asking their opinion about a chevrolet.
then again, maybe that's just me, i'm a skeptical by nature, i'll only believe specs when i see them.

What's wrong with him saying he hadn't heard much about PS4 yet? Why does that make what he's heard about the new Xbox unreliable? He hasn't really said anything that outlandish about the next Xbox, it's been pretty similar to what GAF's other rumour guys have said. These discussions will surely deteriorate if things continue to get personal and petty.

i think i explained myself better in this post. sorry for the off-topic i guess. i just feel there's a conflict of interests. but i'll stop now. i don't have anything "against" him, i just don't take his (and other people here, like thuway for example) words as granted as some people here do, that's what i was trying to say.
 

Globox_82

Banned
If we were talking about a guy coming up with a bunch of reasons why Sony is going to deliver an underpowered system and MS an overpowered system (Like a bunch of people do, for either way) then I would understand your reaction.

Doesn't hold much water in this situation, since apparently his only sin is that he isn't saying PS4 will be more powerful than Xbox next...

Prior to this he is know as being pro MS, which is fine by me I have zero problem with that. But saying that guy is not at least a bit biased based on his history is silly. Again no problem with his pro MS stance and it has nothing to do with his comments on PS4 which could be 100% true.

EDIT: let's not go off topic anymore.
 

AgentP

Thinks mods influence posters politics. Promoted to QAnon Editor.
I'm trying to make sense of AMDs APU line, maybe someone can help map it to the PS4 (or 720)


image.php


It looks like the PS4 APU is based on Kabini (though clocked high for performance, not low for energy saving). Jaguar cores are small and low power enough for a console, yet have full feature support including 256-bit AVX. I'm wondering if they will use features from Kaveri, like HSA support?

Ironically for AMD, Jaguar comes with support for AVX and these would be best fit by 256-bit wide FPU pipelines, but this is not the main concern for a mobile-oriented architecture.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/AMD-s-Jaguar-Computing-Core-Revealed-FPUs-Doubled-288711.shtml

Trinity, the company’s latest APU available to consumers, beefs up the GPU and CPU interconnects with the Radeon Memory Bus and FCL connections. These allow the GPU access to system memory and the CPU to access the GPU frame buffer through a 256-bit and 128-bit wide bus (per channel, each direction) respectively. This allows the graphics core and x86 processor modules to access the same memory areas and communicate with each other.

Kaveri will take that idea even further with shared memory and a unified address space. The company is not yet talking about how it will specifically achieve this with hardware, but a shared on-die cache is not out of the question — a layer that has been noticeably absent from AMD’s APUs. Phil Rogers, AMD Corporate Fellow, did state that the CPU and GPU would be able to share data between them from a single unified address space. This will prevent the relatively time-intensive need to copy data from CPU-addressable memory to GPU-addressable memory space — and will vastly improve performance as a result.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/di...r_2013_Richland_Kabini_Temash_and_Kaveri.html

Sorry if this was covered in other threads.
 
Prior to this he is know as being pro MS, which is fine by me I have zero problem with that. But saying that guy is not at least a bit biased based on his history is silly. Again no problem with his pro MS stance and it has nothing to do with his comments on PS4 which could be 100% true.

EDIT: let's not go off topic anymore.

I haven't seen his pro MS stance before, but I wasn't looking for it either. Either way, if it has nothing to do with his PS4 comments, then why bring it up? It looks poor on those who point fingers, at least wait until devs can talk about it to see what's up. Will we say they are pro whatever too? They are lazy? etc

I agree though, let's move on from this childish topic.
 
I've gotten into this discussion before, but are you talking about non-gaming apps when you say OS, or are you talking about the actual OS? If you're talking about the operating system, you want that on the fastest RAM and CPU the system has, because games are constantly talking to it. Put the OS in a separate, slower area, and it'll slow down everything else in addition to making the system vastly more complex.

Putting apps in separate RAM would be okay, but it'd still make the system more complex and expensive. Besides, the Vita can do a lot in ~128 MB of reserved RAM, including running a halfway decent HTML5 browser.

I was talking about non-gaming apps. Your Vita example makes sense but I want a lot more out of my PS4. People have mentioned this but the future is services and Sony needs to realize this.
 

Razgreez

Member
Oh Eurogamer... what've you done?

Read too much gaf as well? All this information seems conveniently cyclical due to the lack of disclosed sources

The general consensus around here was that less was known about the psnext ... Now the consensus seems to be the psnext hardware is all but known and the nextbox is the lesser known quantity yet we haven't actually received any new information
 

Iacobellis

Junior Member
Sony had PS3 final dev kits in may, true, but we were talking about completely new tech. Xbox 360 was worse than that, but obviously it reflected poorly in their launch hardware. They clearly needed more time.

Both suffered terrible shortages didn't they? Hell specially Sony, 200.000 units for PS3 launch in North America...and they only released it in Europe in 2007.

I stand by my reasoning.



Well I certainly believe final dev kits will come way earlier this time around, but we will see. Wii U final dev kits came in January for example.

Yeah, MS used actual Power Macs at E3 2005.

G5s.jpg
 
Why hasn't the Xbox361 in the 4/2010 leaked Xbox 720 powerpoint been released yet? Why was the latest PS3 refresh not a refresh?

Are the Xbox 361 and PS3.5 going to be based on Thebe? Is Thebe hidden in Kryptos? microsoft-sony.com July 2011 = July 2011 Digitimes PS4 rumor Sony to start PS4 production at end of 2011 (Oban taped out Dec 2011).

Thebe = customized AMD APU with two 1PPU3SPU CPU packages and 2 Jaguar packages with a 8280 2CU GPU that can emulate a Xbox 360 or PS3. 1PPU3SPU made by IBM on SOI at 22nm and TSV attached to Thebe's Oban Transposer.

1PPU3SPU =1/2 of a Cell but able to be used in a Multi-processor architecture APU. Sony patent in 12/2010 and IBM 2010 patents for a VTE = 1 manager CPU (PPU) and 3 Vector processors (SPUs) see below. They look functionally identical.

Parallelized Ray Tracing IBM patent May 2010 drawing below (published Nov 2011)

patents


Ray tracing image processing system filed 2006 but published 3/2012 This is a software patent for the above drawing.

Feb 2011 article
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/kaigai/20110210_425921.html said:
SCE's plans for PS4 generation machine, the various plans so far surfaced, disappeared. Larrabee and Intel's plan to use, IBM PowerPC-based development centers in Rochester there was a plan to develop a CPU. However, last year (2010) in the middle, the plan was back to the drawing board for all these. Currently, there are even plans to run, so would not be at an advanced stage.

 As a result, SCE's 32nm/28nm generation process is likely to have no plans of silicon stationary machines. Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) said that no plans for 32nm process version. In other words, SCE-CPU machines deferred production, presumably they can empty a process generations. Perhaps the next generation is going to be a 22nm/20nm for subsequent generations of the process.
7) Elizabeth Gerhard's Projects (IBM employee) and an International project involving the Xbox 360 @ 32nm and NO design work for a PS3 refresh at 32nm but work on 22nm registers. NO Xbox refresh @ 32nm has surfaced.



2) digitimes PS4 rumor (Must be a PS3 that was confused with a PS4)
3) Leaked Xbox 720 powerpoint document from 9/2010 which has the Xbox 361 coming this 2012 season. IF Oban 12/2011 then 9/2010 was after it was in the pipeline to be produced.
4) This patent and the timing in both filing and publishing XTV game support.
5) Both ps3 and Xbox 360 refresh must have a price reduction built in to allow a price reduction when the PS4 and Xbox 720 are released. This is already possible for the Xbox 360 but the PS3 would NEED a massive redesign to put both CPU and GPU on the same silicon.
6) Sony 2010 1PPU4SPU patent

8) Oban = large blank Japanese Coin => Is Oban for both the PS3 and Xbox 361 (Microsoft making the chip for Sony using 1PPU3SPU CPU packages instead of just PPUs )
 
Plans change jeff.
Which is why I put the dates in the articles. All the patents I reference were filed AFTER the plans changed:

After 4/2010 for Microsoft's Xbox361 and After the middle of 2010 (Hiroshi Goto article) for Sony (1PPU3SPU patent was filed 8/2010 and published 12/2010). 1PPU3SPU CPU packages are PERFECT for/designed for/intended for vector processing of video and audio. AMD GPUs can do the same but suffer from issues when changing gears/jobs that's fixed in 2014 designs but we are probably getting a 2013 design without graphics pre-emption and Context switching.

There needs to be a low end game machine like the PS2 going into the next generation and that was supposed to be the PS3 and Xbox 361. Where is the inexpensive PS3 and Xbox 361, prices have remained the same because refreshed cheaper designs have not been released. Where are they?
 

Jburton

Banned
Well even if all that is true The Verge seems to like Apple pretty much - at least one of the editors at the unveilling of some iPad "shed tears of joy" that doesn't go well with you theory. I did not read a single article on polygon so I can't tell anything about the people working there. I read posts by aegis here and I wouldn't say he is biased towards MS but better informed/interested.

Better informed / interested?

More interested in one over the other is a type of bias.
 
Ray tracing as a mean of rendering the frame no.
Maybe Ray tracing unit to help with Cone tracing or other pseudo techniques for GI like that Unreal Engine 4 demo movie.

There are rumors about U4 ditching it's voxel based lightning. I wonder what that means about next gen hardware if true.
 
It means next-gen isn't as powerful as they expected them to be.

Tell us more Alstrong! What would be a good replacement for SVOGI in Epic's case?

No fucking way ray tracing is in next gen consoles.

This. I swear the number of people I've seen thinking Durango is going to do real time raytracing at 1080p has been painfully hilarious. We're another generation away from that entering the realm of possibility in a console.

Secret sauce makes people think crazy things yo.
 

THE:MILKMAN

Member
Talking of secret sauce. What I can't get my head around is that the specs for both so far favour Orbis, except total RAM, but the insiders on Durango seem to be hinting, and seem confident, that the secret sauce in it will see it equal/exceed it.

Yet they claim to know nothing of what is in Orbis.....It's really bugging me what they're hinting at. Is it hardware or software or a combo?

What could it be?
 

AlStrong

Member
Tell us more Alstrong! What would be a good replacement for SVOGI in Epic's case?

We're gettin' baked for a few years. :3

But I mean, there are alternatives like Enlighten or LPV (crytek), just not as "great". Anyways, nothing is certain, we are basically getting a nice jump from dx9-class capabilities.
 
We're gettin' baked for a few years. :3

But I mean, there are alternatives like Enlighten or LPV (crytek), just not as "great". Anyways, nothing is certain, we are basically getting a nice jump from dx9-class capabilities.

Lightmass or something a step beyond? Didn't Epic do something similar with UE3 as well?
 

AlStrong

Member
Lightmass or something a step beyond? Didn't Epic do something similar with UE3 as well?

Lightmass is essentially baked GI. A number of games also use light probes to apply the lighting to objects moving around in said environments.

The thing is that having a fully dynamic solution may have changed how certain games were designed. Devs will play to the strengths of what's given though.


Or they need to port it to the 720 hardware :p
I see no reason to ditch tech you build and not use it for pc ports.

Or even WiiU :3 I keed.
 

Perkel

Banned
Tell us more Alstrong! What would be a good replacement for SVOGI in Epic's case?



This. I swear the number of people I've seen thinking Durango is going to do real time raytracing at 1080p has been painfully hilarious. We're another generation away from that entering the realm of possibility in a console.

Secret sauce makes people think crazy things yo.

Yeah right now RT for scale of today games is not possible on current hardware (next gen). Problem is rasterization have also limits. I mean all those advanced techniques are just recreating or emulate parts of RT rendering. In some point in future it will be more taxing for hardware to emulate those effect rather than use actual RT.

I mean we have gone from 0,25Tflop to 2-3Tflop today and with some cards (dualcore or sli) 4-5Tflops. And actuall graphic isn't 10-20 times better.

Different part is that RT need proper pipelines for actual game developing. No one still treat it as viable rendering method for gaming and noone pursue that right now (because of obvious reasons)

This was done several years ago. It shows just one car without actual landscape but it was done on 3 PS3. That's ~0,75Tflop. With today PC we could generate in real time 4 and a half cars like that (considering it is the same tech without upgrades) with medium PC. That's still without world which will be most taxing.

I'm no engine programer but amount of Tflop power to generate something like that on full scale like in GT5 or forza would be way above 20Tflop. (with this technology in vid)
 
More recently Wolfenstein was raytraced back in 2010 using 8 Intel Knights Ferry MICs. And even then only managed 20fps at 1280x720.

Lightmass is essentially baked GI. A number of games also use light probes to apply the lighting to objects moving around in said environments.

The thing is that having a fully dynamic solution may have changed how certain games were designed. Devs will play to the strengths of what's given though.

Right I understand I was more asking lightmass in regards to the bake statement. As in is Epic regressing back to Lightmass until they reintroduce SVOGI or are they using something else entirely in it's place. Wouldn't the removal of SVOGI cause some issues with developers who were knee deep in their next gen game development?
 

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Talking of secret sauce. What I can't get my head around is that the specs for both so far favour Orbis, except total RAM, but the insiders on Durango seem to be hinting, and seem confident, that the secret sauce in it will see it equal/exceed it.

Yet they claim to know nothing of what is in Orbis.....It's really bugging me what they're hinting at. Is it hardware or software or a combo?

What could it be?

There's likely some stuff in there that might make Durango as good or a bit better than Orbis at certain specific tasks. And maybe a bit of hardware that helps developers out with some of the peculiarities and characteristics of Durango's memory setup (which would be less relevant in a comparison with Orbis).

Orbis might also have, in addition to the core processors, stuff like that also, targeting different things.

I think the idea of 'secret sauce' that accelerates Durango in a general multiplier sense has maybe got a bit mixed up. From comments I've read I get the impression people were 'just' talking about the usual closed-box development and optimisation letting devs get more out of less when talking about boxes acting like much more powerful PC equivalents.

You also have to bear in mind - and I hope I can say this without causing offense to anyone - that some of the sentiment around this might be based on an opinion or a small sample of developer opinions that have gotten bandied about like an echo chamber. And that some of our 'insiders' are actually on the outside looking in, and trying to figure it out from a lay person's point of view, which can raise misunderstandings. And that they may not have the full picture.

I don't have any insider info, but my first paragraph above is my impression from what's been said so far. I don't think we're talking about silver bullets or apples-for-apples compensation for relative strengths and weaknesses - there is not a lot of doubt in my mind that the main general-case workhorses of these systems are the GPUs and CPUs we've heard discussed.
 
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