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TRUTHFACT: MS having eSRAM yield problems on Xbox One

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M

MogCakes

Member
SenjutsuSage said:
Nobody else on this site outs who their sources are. And clearly I'm in no position to say who their sources are, or how they come by that information, but I've heard from a very reliable individual whom I trust completely, and that individual has said both that this is not true, and that they have heard no such thing. I place extra weight on the person saying it, more so than what I might hear from any site, or even from typically reliable posters on this forum, because it is my firm belief that if this person doesn't know what's going on, then shit has truly hit the fan.

People can take that for what it's worth. If a mod deems it necessary to ask me why I'm so sure, I'm more than happy to tell them why, on the grounds that it remains confidential, of course.
Click to expand...
Of course no one else outs their sources, they became credible because of consistency in their predictions being accurate. You don't have that track record yet, so naturally people are going to be skeptical. That's how it is. But when you say shit like

SenjutsuSage said:
Say whatever you want, I have every right to my opinion. Am I too positive about the Xbox One for your liking? Sorry, next time I'll be sure to clear all my thoughts with you first.

I don't care if you don't believe me. Surprise! I understand that you don't like any positive in your xbox one negative news, but it is what it is lol.
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you bet your ass people are going to call you out.
 
A

abic

Banned
SenjutsuSage said:
I'm actually the relatively sane person that was telling people on this forum all along that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Xbox One specs as reported by vgleaks, and that it was quite capable of delivering incredible games and not nearly as underpowered as people believe. I added that it didn't matter how much stronger or weaker it was compared to the PS4, because that isn't important. What's more important is Microsoft giving developers enough power to create incredible games, and I feel they have done that.
Click to expand...

This is PR talk at its best.
 
K

kuroshiki

Member
I'm actually the relatively sane person that was telling people on this forum all along that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Xbox One specs as reported by vgleaks, and that it was quite capable of delivering incredible games and not nearly as underpowered as people believe. I added that it didn't matter how much stronger or weaker it was compared to the PS4, because that isn't important. What's more important is Microsoft giving developers enough power to create incredible games, and I feel they have done that.
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What. The. Fuck.
 
F

FullMetalx117

Member
Microsoft even with the issues will still launch this fall. They will probably be under stocked. This may actually "help" them. The less of something that is available, the more the people that want it. Helped the Wii
 
K

kuroshiki

Member
FullMetalx117 said:
Microsoft even with the issues will still launch this fall. They will probably be under stocked. This may actually "help" them. The less of something that is available, the more the people that want it. Helped the Wii
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The problem is if they under clock this one, then all the games that come after HAVE to consider those initial shipments. Those they have to lower common denominator.

This is not like Ipad where refresh comes every year. MS better not fuck this one up.
 
C

Chinner

Banned
is this really an issue? surely microsoft could just invest money into more cloud servers so they can pick up the slack of the slower clockspeeds??
 
SenjutsuSage

SenjutsuSage

Banned
KidBeta said:
Good!.

Btw is your saying anything about the manufacturing problems or just the downclock.
Click to expand...

Yep, the manufacturing issues have been confirmed many times over, and by many others outside the individual I'm referencing currently. The ESRAM is indeed having manufacturing issues and giving them some headaches, but the headache was serious enough to delay the console back in December of last year, they aren't nearly as serious now and are more or less precisely where they want to be. The yields have improved, and Microsoft are pretty confident that ESRAM will run extremely cool without any heating issues. It's just a bitch to manufacture, but this is nothing they didn't anticipate and, again, they are more or less where they thought they would be at this point (that is said quite often). They also expect it will easily allow them to cost reduce the console faster than might have been the case going with any other design route, because they can have this made at more places than is the case for other parts they considered.

They also believe ESRAM is going to be a bigger payoff than what people are believing right now, which is largely why I've been stressing the ESRAM in other threads, but mostly avoiding using stuff I've heard on my own, because I can't exactly say where I got it from nor prove it to anyone, but instead mostly using posts from Beyond3D to support my suggestions and belief that ESRAM will be a design win for the Xbox One.

Manufacturing issues are real. A downclock is something that the individual is not aware of, and doesn't believe is true.
 
P

Piggus

Member
Underclocking the GPU wouldn't really make sense to me if they're having problems with the eSRAM. I could be wrong, but yields usually have to do with the number of working chips coming off the assembly line and not their thermal performance. If the GPU is getting too hot and that is causing problems for the eSRAM (which seems pretty unlikely to me) then yeah, underclocking could mitigate that a bit. But it really just sounds like the eSRAM is too complex (that's A LOT of transistors) and therefore is more difficult to produce. Sony ran into the same issue on PS3 with CELL and they ended up disabling one of the SPUs since many chips came off the line with at least one non-working SPU.

If MS is indeed having trouble with just the eSRAM then it could definitely lead to shortages. There isn't anything on the APU that they could disable as far as I know that would improve yields.
 
Neff

Neff

Member
scytherage said:
With these rumored changes to the hardware happening so close to launch, I'm suspicious we're going to see some version of RROD yet again. Microsoft showed last gen they don't really care if the boxes break, they care more that they sell them and reach critical mass with their installed base.
Click to expand...

Based on Microsoft's history and late hardware development, in addition to their -as you state- preference for getting their product sold early (which was arguably the main contributor to 360's success) over releasing a robust, tested product, whether it be hardware or software, I would be extremely wary of purchasing a release model of the One.

It really doesn't look like they're on top of this at all.
 
Acheteedo

Acheteedo

Member
Oh lord, don't like the sound of this. Sadly this might effect PS4 multiplatform games too, unless it's just a crazy coincidence that multiplatform games on 360/PS3 are identical these days. Get your shit sorted, MS.

Cerny must be feeling pretty smug these days, and with good reason, he seems to have made some incredibly forward-thinking design decisions.
 
G

Gustav

Banned
GAFs reaction:
57395-girls-ranger-pics-post-them-up-grumpycatgood-jpg
Click to expand...
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
Acheteedo said:
Oh lord, don't like the sound of this. Sadly this might effect PS4 multiplatform games too, unless it's just a crazy coincidence that multiplatform games on 360/PS3 are identical these days. Get your shit sorted, MS.

Cerny must be feeling pretty smug these days, and with good reason, he seems to have made some incredibly forward-thinking design decisions.
Click to expand...

I doubt it. Probably too busy working on his game.
 
P

Piggus

Member
Pristine_Condition said:
Not really. AnandTech and Wired had the best rundown of the hardware to date, and AnandTech was going with the old rumored (I think based on VGLeaks) numbers in their rundown

EDIT: They weren't talking about the GPU...sorry.
Click to expand...

There's more confirmed info than you think. From Digital Foundry:

In terms of the GPU hardware, hard information was difficult to come by, but one of the engineers did let slip with a significant stat - 768 operations per clock. We know that both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are based on Radeon GCN architecture and we also know that each compute unit is capable of 64 operations per clock. So, again through a process of extrapolation from the drip-feed of hard facts, the make-up of the One's GPU is confirmed - 12 compute units each capable of 64 ops/clock gives us the 768 total revealed by Microsoft and thus, by extension, the 1.2 teraflop graphics core.
Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-spec-analysis-xbox-one

EDIT: missed your edit ;p
 
K

kuroshiki

Member
Piggus said:
Underclocking the GPU wouldn't really make sense to me if they're having problems with the eSRAM. I could be wrong, but yields usually have to do with the number of working chips coming off the assembly line and not their thermal performance. If the GPU is getting too hot and that is causing problems for the eSRAM (which seems pretty unlikely to me) then yeah, underclocking could mitigate that a bit. But it really just sounds like the eSRAM is too complex (that's A LOT of transistors) and therefore is more difficult to produce. Sony ran into the same issue on PS3 with CELL and they ended up disabling one of the SPUs since many chips came off the line with at least one non-working SPU.

If MS is indeed having trouble with just the eSRAM then it could definitely lead to shortages. There isn't anything on the APU that they could disable as far as I know that would improve yields.
Click to expand...

Think this way.

Sony's APU is 3 billion transistors. MS's is 5 billion. And more complex because of added parts.

Because they are all in one part, one part fucked up means the whole APU will be affected by it. And since 25% of APU's die is dedicated for ESRAM (in my opinion this is not smart at all. With this many transistors MS should have just outright put more GPU power), the heat issue can be quite real.

and since ESRAM's bandwidth is directly correlated with GPU's speed (lower GPU speed and lower the ESRAM bandwidth therefore lower the thermal issue) seems plausible, but I still don't think MS can be THAT stupid to figure out this in the blueprint stage.




If they did then this is colossal FUCK UP.

come to think of it the yield for this chip must be horrible.
 
P

Piggus

Member
kuroshiki said:
Think this way.

Sony's APU is 3 billion transistors. MS's is 5 billion. And more complex because of added parts.

Because they are all in one part, one part fucked up means the whole APU will be affected by it. And since 25% of APU's die is dedicated for ESRAM (in my opinion this is not smart at all. With this many transistors MS should have just outright put more GPU power), the heat issue can be quite real.

and since ESRAM's bandwidth is directly correlated with GPU's speed (lower GPU speed and lower the ESRAM bandwidth therefore lower the thermal issue) seems plausible, but I still don't think MS can be THAT stupid to figure out this in the blueprint stage.




If they did then this is colossal FUCK UP.

come to think of it the yield for this chip must be horrible.
Click to expand...

Makes sense. Thanks!
 
H

HyperionX

Member
artist said:
Transistor density varies for example L1/L2 caches versus plain logic. You cant use the transistor density between two completely different ASICs.
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They're not really that different. Same process (28nm from TSMC), from the same company (AMD). And CPU transistor density tends to be worse than GPU density.

The only wildcard is the eSRAM. I'm afraid to say that TSMC does not have a particularly dense implementation of SRAM chips. Even at 20nm, the best they can do is 112Mb at 40.3mm^2. Seeing how MS is using 256Mb on a 28nm process that does not bode well for density. 256/112 * 40.3 * 2 = 184 mm^2 which is pretty huge for a block of ESRAM.
 
W

wsippel

Banned
Unknown Soldier said:
They're using what is called '6T-SRAM', I believe.
Click to expand...
Yes. Six transistors per bit, meaning one third of the whole APU is SRAM. To put that into perspective: The Xbox One APU is almost three times the size of Latte at a smaller process, yet Latte has even more embedded memory (35MB).
 
A

AOC83

Banned
Thunder Monkey said:
I'd consider a swing of 2-3x the flop count using similar architectures as woefully underpowered. I mean single GPU's have been launching for the past year with effective flop rates at 2x the entire PS4 system. By the end of this year we'll be looking at that on similar architectures.
Click to expand...

You are comparing PC flops 1:1 to console flops. We already had multiple developers confirm that it doesn´t work that way,e.g. the Metro guys and John Carmack.
A closed environment hardware produces much better results than a PC with similar specs.
 
CassidyIzABeast

CassidyIzABeast

Member
kuroshiki said:
Think this way.

Sony's APU is 3 billion transistors. MS's is 5 billion. And more complex because of added parts.

Because they are all in one part, one part fucked up means the whole APU will be affected by it. And since 25% of APU's die is dedicated for ESRAM (in my opinion this is not smart at all. With this many transistors MS should have just outright put more GPU power), the heat issue can be quite real.

and since ESRAM's bandwidth is directly correlated with GPU's speed (lower GPU speed and lower the ESRAM bandwidth therefore lower the thermal issue) seems plausible, but I still don't think MS can be THAT stupid to figure out this in the blueprint stage.




If they did then this is colossal FUCK UP.

come to think of it the yield for this chip must be horrible.
Click to expand...
I think thuway said something about Microsoft having the esram + ddr3 combo as far as 3 years out. If this is true then somebody is getting fired.
 
B

Barack Lesnar

Banned
StevieP said:
Long story short: A bet with nirolak in knowing something prior to it being public knowledge.

Azak: I assume he meant a GPU downclock, as the Es ram issues are something that has been ongoing for a while now.
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All you got 'right' was that lighting being removed from UE4 in a vague manner. You've gotten so many things wrong in the past it's become a joke. I'm 99% sure your "third-hand info" is just from scouring Beyond3D posts, you don't have any sources.

No idea about Thuway and this new guy Sanju.

Proelite I've always been skeptical about.
 
D

Dirtyshubb

Member
SenjutsuSage said:
I'm actually the relatively sane person that was telling people on this forum all along that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Xbox One specs as reported by vgleaks, and that it was quite capable of delivering incredible games and not nearly as underpowered as people believe. I added that it didn't matter how much stronger or weaker it was compared to the PS4, because that isn't important. What's more important is Microsoft giving developers enough power to create incredible games, and I feel they have done that.
Click to expand...

Why am i reminded that Bish is due to cull some corporate shills soon when reading this part?

Maybe we will know his 'source' soon enough ;)
 
B

bigboss370

Member
PS4 is going to be not 50%, but 100% more powerful? This is kind of hard to believe, 50% more powerful was insane enough.

Even if this is true, won't it be a long time before we know for sure? I think MS are done talking specs.
 
K

kuroshiki

Member
bigboss370 said:
PS4 is going to be not 50%, but 100% more powerful? This is kind of hard to believe, 50% more powerful was insane enough.

Even if this is true, won't it be a long time before we know for sure? I think MS are done talking specs.
Click to expand...

If this is indeed true then MS doesn't have to say a single word.

every multi platform game basically will have 2x framerate on PS4, unless MS ask developers specifically gimp PS4 version. Gamers will notice right away.
 
intheinbetween

intheinbetween

Member
bigboss370 said:
PS4 is going to be not 50%, but 100% more powerful? This is kind of hard to believe, 50% more powerful was insane enough.

Even if this is true, won't it be a long time before we know for sure? I think MS are done talking specs.
Click to expand...

more than that, over 9000!!!111!111!!ONE!!!11!
 
Acheteedo

Acheteedo

Member
kuroshiki said:
Every multi platform game basically will have 2x framerate on PS4, unless MS ask developers specifically gimp PS4 version.
Click to expand...

They did this gen, why wouldn't they next gen? My hope is that the power difference will be substantial enough for developers to refuse to level the playing field, but that just seems like wishful thinking.
 
S

spwolf

Member
IF it is true, and thats a BIG IF, and XO comes at 50% of PS4 GPU, for same or more money... then it better come with free HBO subscription.
 
M

Midnight Phoenix

Member
Chinner said:
is this really an issue? surely microsoft could just invest money into more cloud servers so they can pick up the slack of the slower clockspeeds??
Click to expand...

You pay for hardware, that not work on full power, because someone slacking. They release console, with underclocked APU and after couple of years they will release new "slim version" with full potential, and when developers start to use it, old versions will have issues.
Cloud works great for off-line calculations, for multimedia applications, performance is crucible. It is very questionable to achieve low time lags, with current technologies.

Disclamer: just my vision on the problem.
 
A

Angelus Errare

Banned
You cats really jump on the negative Xbox rumor quick as hell. Now if Thuway said the GPU and CPU got a huge clock increase...how many of you would believe that? D:
 
P

plufim

Member
So if this is all true, none of the three consoles will be of comparable power.

That will be interesting (disastrous) for third parties - it will result in PS4 games being the Xboxone version running at a decent framerate, I guess?
 
SenjutsuSage

SenjutsuSage

Banned
abic said:
This is PR talk at its best.
Click to expand...

Too reasonable and non console warriorish? :p I'll say it again, I think the One's specs are fine as they are. I don't look at them and think developers are being handed a weak console. Sure, weak by high end pc standards, maybe but not as it concerns an upgrade from the Xbox 360. I plan on owning the PS4, and have said so many times, so maybe I just don't see it the way that some of you do.

But, rest assured, I'm not changing my view to conform to however you guys think I should talk. My very first post on this forum was one saying that it doesn't matter if the PS4 is a stronger console than the Xbox One, and said more or less exactly what I said here, albeit in a longer way.

SenjutsuSage said:
And the opinion part of my comments comes from your seeming to take offense to my having positive things to say about the Xbox One, as if I haven't also done the same for the Wii-U, PS3 and PS4. Listen, I have nothing to prove to you. I said something and I stand by it. You don't like it? Tough.
Click to expand...

And an earlier post in this thread where I already addressed the part regarding my opinion. It wasn't in regards to me saying the downclock is not accurate. It was in reference to my being challenged on having a positive opinion on the Xbox One.
 
I

IHaveCandy

Banned
Why didnt MS just do ~3 GB of DDR3 RAM for the OS and 4 GB of GDDR5 RAM for the games to run on instead of doing this eSRAM patchwork?
 
P

Pristine_Condition

Member
kuroshiki said:
If this is indeed true then MS doesn't have to say a single word.

every multi platform game basically will have 2x framerate on PS4, unless MS ask developers specifically gimp PS4 version. Gamers will notice right away.
Click to expand...

I kinda laugh at this notion.

It's extremely unlikely. In your scenario, unless they'd get every third-party to agree (impossible, basically) to gimp their software, any number of third-parties that didn't agree to such a conspiracy would make the ones that did agree look utterly incompetent by comparison. No developer will want to look incompetent. There's a lot of professional pride. Plus, as a developer, your ability to get that next job is often built on the perceived quality/reception of the last games you worked on. So developers have an incentive to do their best.
 
G

guek

Banned
plufim said:
So if this is all true, none of the three consoles will be of comparable power.

That will be interesting (disastrous) for third parties - it will result in PS4 games being the Xboxone version running at a decent framerate, I guess?
Click to expand...

It's gonna be really bizarre. Looks like Sony might have this one in the bag though as long as they don't mess up on price or failure rate
 
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