Orbis unmasked: what to expect from the next-gen PlayStation?

[god_43]

Both the next generation PlayStation - and its Xbox competitor - feature eight-core CPUs clocked at 1.6GHz according to sources trusted by Digital Foundry. The main processor architecture driving both consoles is said to be derived the new "Jaguar" technology currently in development by Intel's arch-rival, AMD. These are low-power processor cores designed for the entry-level laptop and tablet market, offering an excellent ratio between power consumption and performance. The PC Jaguar products are set to ship later this year in a quad-core configuration - next-gen consoles see the core count double with some customizations added to the overall design.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df...xt-gen-console


8-core jaguar...wtf?

[PatRaceTin]

Apu ?

[kromosto]

while for gaming everybody chooses less core but high clocked cpus as the reasons obvious why console makers made this kind of a ........ lets say strange decision. or did they just decided to use as much parallelism as they can.

[PedantOne]

i think it is maybe 15-th article with "sure next gen console specs", it is BS again.

[kromosto]

If this one a bs too then do this make my comment bs too

Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk 2

[informal]

I have to admit that specs rumored in that article are a bit strange. 8C Jaguar with no iGPU is not what AMD would normally do if its sole purpose was a console. More likely was just a SR or PD based QC "APU" at higher clocks (3.2Ghz) supporting hybrid CFX with a corresponding HD8000 discrete card.

[Mechanical Man]

I have to admit that specs rumored in that article are a bit strange. 8C Jaguar with no iGPU is not what AMD would normally do if its sole purpose was a console. More likely was just a SR or PD based QC "APU" at higher clocks (3.2Ghz) supporting hybrid CFX with a corresponding HD8000 discrete card.

I dont see that impossible. It might be that these "dedicated custom parts" are iGPU that is used for physics etc. Then discrete gpu for graphics. Consoles need to be low power and SR nor PD are low power desings so i see jaguar base lot better option, if one jaguar cpu core takes watt or two @ 1,6GHz its most likely more cost effective to add few more than to up clock speeds and change arch. With consoles having true multicore designs, we can just assume that games will benefit from more cores in future better than its case today. Engines build for minimum six cores in mind etc.

I must add, that more cores over fewer stronger cores would be benefit of AMD as well...

[informal]

Trinity QC mobile parts have 35W TDP for both CPU and GPu while CPU can work from 2.3 to 3.2Ghz . These SKUs are low power parts.

[Tao~]

8 cores does not seem a strange choice from the lowest power for equivalent computational resources point of view - I believe software can be easily developed to incorporate better usage of multi-core systems. Plus these consoles will be geared more towards complete home entertainment than their predecessors - multitasking capabilities are a plus.

However what I am more interested in is the configuration of the graphics core. It will be GCN v2 (Sea Islands) but shader count and FLOPS are still missing.

[Olivon]

From my understanding, PS4 is Pitcairn chip (1.84 teraflops).

[DeathReborn]

If it does have 8 Jaguar cores I hope they have a Turbo function for 4+ cores to provide better 1-4 thread throughput. One thing I am pleased with is AMD CPU's being used in the consoles, hopefully that will bleed through to their desktop parts being better optimised for gaming loads.

The closer the consoles get in general to PC hardware (x86, DX11+) the better grade of ports we will get. The control system is really getting my interest up though, maybe they will have a system so similar to the Vita that Vita consoles can operate fully with the PS4 (better integration than the Wii U's Tabroller).

[[XC] hipno650]

the possible move to 8 cores is very interesting. because the cores themselves are so slow on their own that devs will be forced to use all the cores they can. Which could do big things for PC games considering the number of games that use mulitcore CPU's properly is laughable. I am pretty surprised at the GPU power however those specs put it almost bang on par with like a 7850 desktop part in terms of clock speed and shader count. the only unknown is the RAM situation. I hope they would have additional dedicated RAM for the part (say like 1GB or more) but If i had to guess it will be shared with the 4GB of system RAM considering that might be GDDR5 which would be fast enough. the next question is the graphics RAM Bus width. Again i would love to see a full 256bit bus with that dedicated RAM but my money is on shared RAM and a 128bit bus.

or the most likely outcome is that these specs are complete crap and wont be similar in any way.

[BHD]

512 MB HDD FOr PS4 Orbis.

3 GB HDD For Xbox 720.

[SKYMTL]

Their memory figures are obviously way off base. Under no circumstance are Jaguar x86 cores compatible with GDDR5 memory. It could very well be that the graphics core has separate memory gating, allowing it to use GDDR5 while the x86 segment retains DDR3.

If the rest of the specs are correct, then don't expect from this console. Jaguar cores are going into AMD's Brazos 2.0 replacement (ie: Kabini) so it sacrifices performance for efficiency. It is also a full blow SoC design, so I'm not sure why they are so surprised at the "all in one" approach.

[G.Foyle]

That article is so weird it's hardly possible it's fabricated. Factoring in some distortion as the info passed from ear to ear (and some possible lack of understanding on author's part), the news could very well be true.

[tbone8ty]

So how big is the die for a quadcore kabini? So my its 2 quadcore kabini chips and they can crossfire the 2 igpu's

[vitchilo]

Whatever the specs, we can be sure it's gonna keep PC gaming years behind for years to come.

[El Mano]

[PedantOne]

If are this specs right, next PS will be "powerfull" as WiiU, and it is impossible

[kromosto]

If are this specs right, next PS will be "powerfull" as WiiU, and it is impossible

why not if they are planing to shorten the time between new consoles? while cell phone companies make their customers buy new phones which are more expensive then consoles every year or even every 6 month why console makers won't make new consoles every 3 years or even better every 2 years?

[informal]

If are this specs right, next PS will be "powerfull" as WiiU, and it is impossible

That's not true. Espresso powerpc core in Wii U is 750 model which is OoO but works at measly 1.24Ghz and has only an 64bit FPU per core. Jaguar on the other hand is a vector crunching monster compared to that poor thing in WiiU since it supports dual 128bit SSE pipelines per core and core count is 8 . Also Jaguar clocks at 1.6Ghz which is 30% more and supports 8 threads/cores which is 2.66x more than Espresso CPU in WiiU. All in all with double FP/vector capability per core,2.6x core count and 1.3x higher frequency Jaguar is a speed monster when compared to PowerPC 750 in WiiU . Since one is x86 and other is powerpc they are not directly comparable but it's pretty obvious Jaguar is much faster than PowerPC 750.

[Hornet331]

lol really guys... its just to funny that people again "piss there pants" about the core count, for games that is still pretty much (still) irrelevant.

Especial console games lack multi-core optimization, id rather see less cores with more computing power. More cores are only really useful when they when they would use it for sophisticated physic simulation or other stuff that can be easily multi threaded.
But looking at the rumors about the next (media)xbox, I wouldn't be surprised that much of the core are just dedicated to some stupid media etc. BS and that it can run games is just a checkbox feature instead of a main design point.

[fellix_bg]

Multi-threading was the only viable way to get good performance from 360's CPU (Cell is another animal altogether), while the other saving feature was the relatively high clock-rate at the time. The PowerPC architecture, in its console reincarnation, is really very simple in-order machine. It barely averaged 0.2 IPC instruction rate (while hand-optimized SIMD code could do a bit better in few cases) - many times lower than what any x86 CPU can do now, heck even a random Cortex-A15 puny SoC.

[vitchilo]

If the consoles become multi-threading, the developpers will be forced to build their game for multi-threading, which is good for the PC market.

[bamtan2]

If there is one thing you can be sure of, it is that the next generation consoles will not be 1.6ghz jaguar cores.