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AMD: PlayStation 4 supports hUMA, Xbox One does not

So what's the word right now? I last viewed this topic when it was 13 pages long. There's no way I'll be able to read everything I missed.

Might be true.... AMD is not allowed to comment on their customers spec differences hence the retraction... either that or it has a custom design similar to it

I hope I got this right feeling quite delusional being in a hot water tub for a long time
 

QaaQer

Member
So what's the word right now? I last viewed this topic when it was 13 pages long. There's no way I'll be able to read everything I missed.

AMD guy at Gamescom shot his mouth off to a German IT mag reporter who stands behind his story. AMD PR issued a statement basically saying "we dont comment on customer products, including Sony and MS products." and that their representative was "innaccurate".
 

artist

Banned
AMD:
tumblr_m3oajdaoFZ1rugtvpo1_250.gif




MICROSOFT:
angryncy78.gif




SONY:
tumblr_mlgq3cttym1qevligo1_500.gif
 

Pistolero

Member
The real info here is that the AMD guy DID actually utter the words to the journalist. I can't imagine the kind of torture he must be enduring as I type...heh!
 

Sorral

Member
The real info here is that the AMD guy DID actually utter the words to the journalist. I can't imagine the kind of torture he must be enduring as I type...heh!
Hopefully they don't fire her for it. Not worth losing a job over. I remember there was a Crytek employee that was fired for mentioning a durango meeting on twitter. (Correct me if I am wrong, but that's what my memory remembers.) The mistake is too easy to make especially if they are not properly warned or had no knowledge of the NDA.

fixed lol


Pretty much.
 

ElTorro

I wanted to dominate the living room. Then I took an ESRAM in the knee.
at the end of the day, both have hUMA ? Or not ? O__O

I think the OP's 4th update is still accurate and balanced.

To summarize the evidence so far: we have an article from a respected source, echoing Senior Product Marketing Manager Marc Diana in saying that PS4 implements their hUMA architecture while the XB1 does not. This is followed by the deduction that PS4 will have a significant performance boost over XB1 because of that. It remains unclear what the AMD representative said verbatim. We can only say that c't is as reputable as it gets in the space of German IT publications; that does not make them infallible, of course.

In addition, Sony is part of the HSA consortium while Microsoft is not. Of course, we don't know the political implications of such a membership which may play a significant role along purely technological reasons.

Technology-wise, we can say with certainty that PS4 indeed is a hUMA architecture. Everything we have heard since the release from official sources, especially PS4's Onion/Garlic memory bus layout and the volatile tag on cache lines, confirms that. In addition, Sony has actually advertised this fact quite aggressively, beginning with the Havok GPGPU demo at the PS4 reveal.

We don't know much what the Xbox One does beyond what the leaked documents tell us. And those are ambiguous and not very detailed. At first, it sounds unexpected for it to not support hUMA. Microsoft certainly has implemented a more custom memory system than Sony to manage its DDR3/ESRAM layout, including its DMEs. There is no clear indication about which features of a hUMA architecture might be lacking. Maybe not all memory clients and pools are cache-coherent system wide. The GPU does seem to have to flush its caches when it synchronizes with other clients. However, the article on vgleaks is neither very detailed nor clear, nor do we know if its author recited the original sources correctly. So the relationship between a hUMA feature set and the XB1 is unclear.

Politics-wise, AMD certainly wants to push hUMA since it is part of its own upcoming end-customer products. This would be reason alone to champion the PS4 independent of what the XB1 does, since AMD won't profit from what Microsoft has done with its memory subsystem.

Apart from that, developers at gamescom seem to acknowledge anonymously that the PS4 has a clear 3D-performance advantage over the Xbox One which is certainly a result of many factors, not least because of its beefier GPU and its straight-forward, high-bandwidth GDDR5 setup.

With the addition that the spokesperson apparently talked about things he was not supposed to talk about, or where they didn't anticipate the visibility.
 
I do hope that all multiplatforms games are made for PS4 and then ported to Xbox. that means we gamer will get the best looking game they could make for consoles.
 

sirap

Member
I do hope that all multiplatforms games are made for PS4 and then ported to Xbox. that means we gamer will get the best looking game they could make for consoles.

Imo this is the best course of action. Difference between the Ps4's power and Xbox is what, 30-40% right? Now can you imagine if devs developed games with the Xbox One as the lead using the clouds? My ps4 will probably catch fire trying to run that thing, 600% more power is too much to ask from something so small.
 
Imo this is the best course of action. Difference between the Ps4's power and Xbox is what, 30-40% right? Now can you imagine if devs developed games with the Xbox One as the lead using the clouds? My ps4 will probably catch fire trying to run that thing, 600% more power is too much to ask from something so small.

If it was that easy Dead Rising 3 wouldn't have such a shitty framerate.
 
As an innocent bystander on this console war (my word means nothing), it's really hard not to point out your transparency when it comes to this issue in terms of the technical differences between each individual machine. Sometimes just sometimes there are things in life you just can't coat in a different shade of green just for you own volition.
I'm not arguing the premise of what you wrote but more the intent.

lol. This is like the nicest way to tell someone they're full of shit. Anyone that reads gaf long enough can tell he has an agenda though.
 

Duxxy3

Member
Imo this is the best course of action. Difference between the Ps4's power and Xbox is what, 30-40% right? Now can you imagine if devs developed games with the Xbox One as the lead using the clouds? My ps4 will probably catch fire trying to run that thing, 600% more power is too much to ask from something so small.

Better off developing on PC first.
 

demolitio

Member
The hell is hUMA?

It's how Arnold Schwarzenegger says "humor" I believe which is something you'll find a lot of in this thread. :D

Gotta love the retractions and ambiguous responses that always follow stories like this one and we're seeing quite a bit of it already. I'm indifferent and will wait and see.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace


That article is also making assumptions. AMD said that Kabini does not support hUMA. The article writer the states that as PS4 is kabini based, it won't have it either. But PS4 being kabini is speculation and simply so that people can more easily compare the console with a PC equivalent. There are customisations and optimisations that mean it isn't a direct kabini part

AMD saying that kabini doesn't have hUMA does not mean that PS4 doesn't.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Oh, this thread got real good in a hurry. That said, let's consider for a moment that we are still dealing with closed box systems that will be easier and easier for developers to utilize over time. Let's also consider that whether one has hUMA and another doesn't, or whether none of them have hUMA, there are many proven technologies and software practices that already do just fine without AMD's hUMA technology, and I can't see why these things wouldn't continue to prove effective absent AMD's technology.

In other words, I think the consoles will be just fine with or without hUMA.

I'd like a dev to comment on this personally, rather than assume this is 'nothing' or that is 'awesome secret sauce'. It sounds like a clear advantage to maximise memory bandwidth through not needing to move data back and forth as much, but perhaps it has limited uses so the practical benefit won't be that big. Or maybe it will.
 

dr_rus

Member
So we're basically back to square one: not really knowing for certain. Should have just slapped a "Rumor" on the topic and called it a day.
Knowing what? All the hUMA noise AMD's making for marketing purposes only. It doesn't mean much for performance, only for programming difficulty. On a console that doesn't mean much anyway.
 

vaxick

Neo Member
Knowing what? All the hUMA noise AMD's making for marketing purposes only. It doesn't mean much for performance, only for programming difficulty. On a console that doesn't mean much anyway.

I'm sure this hUMA feature would be a cakewalk to program for compared to the CELL or the Emotion Engine for that matter.
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
I'm sure this hUMA feature would be a cakewalk to program for compared to the CELL or the Emotion Engine for that matter.
Well, yes, but virtually every non-Sony console has been a cakewalk to programme for in comparison to those.
 

vaxick

Neo Member
Well, yes, but virtually every non-Sony console has been a cakewalk to programme for in comparison to those.

The only console that would make the PS2 and PS3 seem simple to program for would be the Atari Jaguar. I can't believe the nightmare Atari developers went through to make games for that overly complex system that literally came with incomplete development documentation because the business men within Atari didn't want "trade secrets" being let out to others.
 

PTG

Member
Is this proof the PS4 supports hUMA?

Slide from Killzone: Shadow Fall demo postmortem:

slide-6-638.jpg


From Arstechnica article:

With hUMA, the CPU and GPU share a single memory space. The GPU can directly access CPU memory addresses, allowing it to both read and write data that the CPU is also reading and writing.

hUMA is a cache coherent system, meaning that the CPU and GPU will always see a consistent view of data in memory. If one processor makes a change then the other processor will see that changed data, even if the old value was being cached.
 

mrklaw

MrArseFace
Knowing what? All the hUMA noise AMD's making for marketing purposes only. It doesn't mean much for performance, only for programming difficulty. On a console that doesn't mean much anyway.

is there common data that we will be constantly shuffling back and forth between CPU and GPU? Yes. Ok, lets put that in this area and make sure we use the onion/garlic/garlic+/whatever bus to ensure coherency. Should speed those routines up nicely and free up some memory for other stuff.

GPGPU will really benefit from this, but that will take some time to show itself.
 

Skeff

Member
Is this proof the PS4 supports hUMA?

Slide from Killzone: Shadow Fall demo postmortem:

slide-6-638.jpg


From Arstechnica article:

Not necessarily no, The shared memory here could simply be a managed reservation that data is copied in and out of between the GPU and CPU reservations.

Although I think Shadowfall is benefiting from hUMA, this doesn't prove it, would be great if someone just came out with everything, such a shame it'll never happen.
 

joshcryer

it's ok, you're all right now
Still can't believe we're on 16 pages and debating this. PS4 supports hUMA-like architecture. It probably doesn't meet the hUMA 1.0 spec (which isn't finished yet) but you can 100% use pointers to do GPGPU calculations without doing a data copy. Why this is important is it saves a copy from relatively slow CPU space to extremely high bandwidth GPU space. No need to do a CPU copy is good news for those wanting to do GPGPU calculations in CPU space without having to wait for the copy to complete. Basically it's there when needed.

This is 100% proof:

http://mygaming.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/AMD-Kaveri-with-HUMA-600x337.jpg

You can't use a pointer to two virtual memory spaces.
 

KidBeta

Junior Member
Still can't believe we're on 16 pages and debating this. PS4 supports hUMA-like architecture. It probably doesn't meet the hUMA 1.0 spec (which isn't finished yet) but you can 100% use pointers to do GPGPU calculations without doing a data copy. Why this is important is it saves a copy from relatively slow CPU space to extremely high bandwidth GPU space. No need to do a CPU copy is good news for those wanting to do GPGPU calculations in CPU space without having to wait for the copy to complete. Basically it's there when needed.

This is 100% proof:

http://mygaming.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/AMD-Kaveri-with-HUMA-600x337.jpg

You can't use a pointer to two virtual memory spaces.

Every GCN GPU has that its part of the architecture.
 

JP

Member
I'm fairly sure that I remember talking about this in one of the videos that are bouncing around. From memory Cerny stated that the PS4 uses a hUMA type system but it was a Sony developed version of it as hUMA hadn't been finalised yet.
 
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