AMD Confirms it Co-Designed Xbox One APU

[vider]

The eight gigs of DDR 3 are not that bad, yes compared to todays available DDR 5 chips on the market, but they were picked before DDR 5 as popular as it is today (By the way DDR 5 has higher latencies than DDR 3).

As such, the R&D team behind XBOX one had to think ahead of it's time and pick the right components for this project (readily available hardware components for the first production run, the components that would make this unit have to be at competitive market price, labor, considered in advance).

People always complain about the short comings of these consoles, many fail to see the fact that EVERYONE (90% of the market, I might be wrong about that one, correct me if so) wants to pay a cheap price!

So which one is it? Are you going to cry about the tech that is inside or are you going to cry about the price? which one would you like to cry about more than the other?

Initially the consoles will cost around (most probably) 399$ (just as the starting price of a PS3 was back in the day, correct me if I'm wrong on this one), at which point the manufacturers (both MS and Sony) will lose money per each console sold (as the production costs for both these models will not be cheap, see Sony's Playstation 3 lunch price vs. production price), but as time will go on and technology will advance the prices will go down and the companies will start finally recovering from those losses.

It's simple mechanics and you don't have to be a genius to understand this.

A few points to consider:
1) eSRAM will allow an on the fly high quality A.A. with minimal performance loss.
2) The PS4 has more shader units (Anand quote: "Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz"), that's cool, but where's A.A. coming into all of this? What will happen to triple A.A. titles when A.A will have to be added into the picture?
3) The XBOX will be easy to develop for (and faster to develop for).
4) Developers, the human factor. At the end of the day it's all about how optimized and well coded a title is and not the theoretical performance differences between the two.

 

[nitrium]

Anand has done an analysis of XBox One vs PS4: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6972/xbox-one-hardware-compared-to-playstation-4
It does look like PS4 will be at roughly 50% more powerful than XB1 outright (1.23 TFlops for XB1 vs 1.84 TFlops for PS4), and possibly more depending how much a bottleneck the DDR3 will give (XB1 has 68.3 GB/sec memory bandwidth vs PS4's 176 GB/sec).
Incidentally I worked out roughly what the compute power is terms of PC GPUs: XB1 is the equivalent of GTX650Ti or HD7770 vs PS4 being the equivalent of a GTX660 or HD7850.

 

[IndignantSkeptic]

8 times the processing performance? That is quite a lot short of the over 40 times predicted by Moore's law. I am highly disappointed.

 

[Computerrock1]

Oh look it's an "entrainment" device... Please look over what you write before you post news articles

 

[TechnoD]

Wow, nice move AMD. People will have two new consoles two choose from, and no matter which one they choose, you make lots of money. (no sarcasm intended - this seems well thought out)

 

[vmem]

Wow, nice move AMD. People will have two new consoles two choose from, and no matter which one they choose, you make lots of money. (no sarcasm intended - this seems well thought out)

more like AMD makes a few dollars per console (literally, if they even get a few dollars). this is much better for AMD's marketing, brand image, and game optimization than it is for actual profit. console sales are extremely low margin, and many companies even sell consoles at a loss

 

[tobalaz]

Hello overheating based red ring of death!
I wonder if they'll make it a different color this time so it won't get the same red ring stigma?
Remember, AMD helped design the chip and won't be in on the manufacturing, that's going to be up to the cheapest bidder. Its beginning to look a lot like a 20% yield to beat the PS4 to market. Early adapters enjoy!

 

[Durandul]

A 7790 is a bit... less then I had hoped. At least I can laugh at console gamers when my year old desktop creams the new console.

 

[somebodyspecial]

Nvidia fanboys can say that Nvidia beats AMD all they want, but AMD is really gunna pull in some cash with the new consoles.

LOL...Assuming they don't sell like the WIIU/Vita etc after xmas pop. Wiiu off 50% in Q1 after xmas release. An article on toms already mentioned Bobby Kotick (activision/blizzard) saying he'll be watching for the Q1 drop-off. IF that happens, they are doomed as phones/tablets/ouya/shield/wikipad/razer edge/steambox/gamepop etc etc take them out.

consoles sell 35mil/year combined all 3 consoles for 7yrs (roughly 250mil over their life and not all are running or being used). Who would you dev for? 35mil (and you have to sell to 100% to count that number in the first year) or 1Bil unit tablet/phone+all the rest I mentioned? All of them work with your old xbox360 controller etc. Watch as shield promoted gampad android games and the rest jump on board. It takes a year for them to get even 35mil out the door combined, so during that time more devs will leave if sales suck in that year.

Did you see the battlefield or hawken T4/T5 demos? When T5 comes May/June next year (and all others, Qcom's next revs, samsung etc) consoles will be caught by a tablet with kepler. Maybe not totally but the experience won't be much different. Now go out another year for T6 etc. There is a reason Epic/Id etc are excited about mobile NOT consoles. By the time they get a year sales in the bag Tablets will be close to their power, not to mention it's likely NV will allow more devices to stream their vid gpus from PC's to TV (it makes no sense not to do this to Kill AMD based consoles right?...This is a Well Duh, move).
http://www.tegrazone.com/news/gdc13markrein
watch the vid. Note he mentions consoles stuck in stone, and mobile revving yearly.

http://www.sonyps4news.com/2013/03/06/nintendo-fast-losing-developer-support-sonys-consoles-remain-firm/
Are game devs planning next gen games? Not many. I don't see sony/xbox strong here, but whatever...11% sucks compared to pc (40% planning projects) and mobile at 60%! When you have so few planning games if consoles don't keep selling after xmas these numbers even listed here in the chart will plummet as they all move to mobile/pc. Wiiu is already in the toilet with handhelds. Less than 3% planning a 3DS games, and only 5% planning Vita games. So dead then? Note because of the xbox360/ps3 sales already out there in your hands they even are ahead for planned games vs ps4/xcrap1. 1080p will be old news shortly, but consoles will be stuck there for 8 more years.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/06/27/epic-sees-future-in-mobile-gaming-free-to-play-model.aspx
Infinity blade more profitable vs. man hours/cost than gears of war...LOL. This was a year ago. With the units of phones/tablets growing so fast what would he say now?

http://www.tegrazone.com/news/epicfutureofmobile
“In some regards, mobile is way better than console,” Smedberg said. “There's way more memory, which allows for much higher texture resolutions.”
Note smedberg also says god rays is better in infinity blade than gears of war, again almost a year ago. What will games be like on T5 etc once they are aiming at this type of soc? With samsung putting out 100mil gs4, you could argue you can aim at this audience as it is large enough to support your game until others catch up. Next June or so GS4's power will be the mid range, the year after everything will have that power. Most current games are aimed at T2/T3 type power or iphone4 etc. The next crop will change mobile gaming.

 

[somebodyspecial]

The eight gigs of DDR 3 are not that bad, yes compared to todays available DDR 5 chips on the market, but they were picked before DDR 5 as popular as it is today (By the way DDR 5 has higher latencies than DDR 3).

As such, the R&D team behind XBOX one had to think ahead of it's time and pick the right components for this project (readily available hardware components for the first production run, the components that would make this unit have to be at competitive market price, labor, considered in advance).

People always complain about the short comings of these consoles, many fail to see the fact that EVERYONE (90% of the market, I might be wrong about that one, correct me if so) wants to pay a cheap price!

So which one is it? Are you going to cry about the tech that is inside or are you going to cry about the price? which one would you like to cry about more than the other?

Initially the consoles will cost around (most probably) 399$ (just as the starting price of a PS3 was back in the day, correct me if I'm wrong on this one), at which point the manufacturers (both MS and Sony) will lose money per each console sold (as the production costs for both these models will not be cheap, see Sony's Playstation 3 lunch price vs. production price), but as time will go on and technology will advance the prices will go down and the companies will start finally recovering from those losses.

It's simple mechanics and you don't have to be a genius to understand this.

A few points to consider:
1) eSRAM will allow an on the fly high quality A.A. with minimal performance loss.
2) The PS4 has more shader units (Anand quote: "Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz"), that's cool, but where's A.A. coming into all of this? What will happen to triple A.A. titles when A.A will have to be added into the picture?
3) The XBOX will be easy to develop for (and faster to develop for).
4) Developers, the human factor. At the end of the day it's all about how optimized and well coded a title is and not the theoretical performance differences between the two.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/e3-06-ps3-launches-11-17-499-for-20gb-599-for-60gb-6149470
$499 & $599. Not $399. With the recent $399 euro (over $500 US) it seems true again. Tough sell if you ask me. MS has an even tougher sell if the gpu power vs. ps4 is correct. Forcing a kinect on everyone isn't good either raising the initial cost for some who would rather never purchase one or add it later when they can afford it. One more note, supposedly MS lost 3B over the life of xbox360.
http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-has-lost-nearly-3-billion-in-10-years
Ouch...So much for your lower cost and recover the loss theory

http://kotaku.com/5973498/weapons-of-mass-disruption-3-how-and-why-consoles-will-die
The original article is even worse Consoles are dead. It really sucks AMD spent a ton on this for special chips which caused their drivers and reputation to tank thus NV took 13% more gpu share (up from 52% 2011, 65% 2012). Rather than concentrating on their core audience (cpu/gpu) they went consoles and killed themselves doing it. Left the Intel race ages ago (as tom's also noted when they gave up) and now killing their great gpus with crap drivers. What could they have done if all the console money was in cpu & gpu?

 

[InvalidError]

I know they'll never say it, but I wish someone from AMD would "leak" which architecture is better, Xbox One or PS4. or just say that they're exactly the same

The PS4 has 8GB GDDR5 RAM to feed its beefier IGP while the Xbox1 has 8GB DDR3 + 32GB eSRAM.

For high definition textures, the PS4 should have the upper-hand. However, the Xbox1's eSRAM may give it the edge on more compute-intensive stuff.

 

[spat55]

This is good for AMD in the way that games will be optimized for there chips, meaning this might push Nvidia ever so slightly further out of there big spot. Also will help dev teams run the games on both machines easily if they both use the same chipsets.

 

[danwat1234]

I know they'll never say it, but I wish someone from AMD would "leak" which architecture is better, Xbox One or PS4. or just say that they're exactly the same

The PS4 has 8GB GDDR5 RAM to feed its beefier IGP while the Xbox1 has 8GB DDR3 + 32GB eSRAM.

For high definition textures, the PS4 should have the upper-hand. However, the Xbox1's eSRAM may give it the edge on more compute-intensive stuff.

You mean PS4 has 8GB DDR3 + 32MB eSRAM

 

[therabiddeer]

I doubt that is the GPU Lucky, since that is a dedicated card and this is an APU. That card had 2GB of GDDR5 memory, this doesnt.
So they have similar APU's but the xbone only has 8GB of DDR3 vs PS4's GDDR5. That should be a pretty significant performance difference, no?

 

[vider]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/e3-06-ps3-launches-11-17-499-for-20gb-599-for-60gb-6149470
$499 & $599. Not $399. With the recent $399 euro (over $500 US) it seems true again. Tough sell if you ask me. MS has an even tougher sell if the gpu power vs. ps4 is correct. Forcing a kinect on everyone isn't good either raising the initial cost for some who would rather never purchase one or add it later when they can afford it. One more note, supposedly MS lost 3B over the life of xbox360.
http://www.neowin.net/news/report-microsofts-xbox-division-has-lost-nearly-3-billion-in-10-years
Ouch...So much for your lower cost and recover the loss theory

http://kotaku.com/5973498/weapons-of-mass-disruption-3-how-and-why-consoles-will-die
The original article is even worse Consoles are dead. It really sucks AMD spent a ton on this for special chips which caused their drivers and reputation to tank thus NV took 13% more gpu share (up from 52% 2011, 65% 2012). Rather than concentrating on their core audience (cpu/gpu) they went consoles and killed themselves doing it. Left the Intel race ages ago (as tom's also noted when they gave up) and now killing their great gpus with crap drivers. What could they have done if all the console money was in cpu & gpu?

In this case, I'm baffled. Why both of these giants walk the same line? It makes no sense to develop a device that only brings no profit of what's or ever!

I'd like to see the mobile/tablet market evolve on the other hand, with predefined industry standards to follow, I belive that would help fortify an already existing (weak) market.

 

[gsxrme]

The tech spec of the CPU and Ram is unclear entirely. The Xbox One may have 256bit DDR3 (quad channel mode) compared to the PS4 running GDDR5 in dual channel. We all known DDR3 responce is faster but the DDR5s through put is more. But... if the Xbox Ones running quad channel memory ddr3 then ddr5 doesn't mean shit as far as being better.
so...
DDR5 128bit? vs ddr3 256bit?!....
I guess we will wait for E3

 

[gsxrme]

The tech spec of the CPU and Ram is unclear entirely. The Xbox One may have 256bit DDR3 (quad channel mode) compared to the PS4 running GDDR5 in dual channel. We all known DDR3 responce is faster but the DDR5s through put is more. But... if the Xbox Ones running quad channel memory ddr3 then ddr5 doesn't mean shit as far as being better.
so...
DDR5 128bit? vs ddr3 256bit?!....
I guess we will wait for E3

 

[gsxrme]

The tech spec of the CPU and Ram is unclear entirely. The Xbox One may have 256bit DDR3 (quad channel mode) compared to the PS4 running GDDR5 in dual channel. We all known DDR3 responce is faster but the DDR5s through put is more. But... if the Xbox Ones running quad channel memory ddr3 then ddr5 doesn't mean shit as far as being better.
so...
DDR5 128bit? vs ddr3 256bit?!....
I guess we will wait for E3

 

[yobobjm]

This is a good thing for AMD. If they're supplying both PS4 and Xbox one APUs that's bascially $$$$ for them.

 

[blubbey]

@somebodyspecial
$499 & $599. Not $399. With the recent $399 euro (over $500 US) it seems true again.

You do realise that at release the top model was €500, right? That would mean a US price of almost $700, remind me again how much it cost? EU pays a good bit more for electronics compared to the US usually. I doubt it'll be over $500. To support that, the currency conversion now is similar to what it was upon release. Given a €500 tag then and it was $600, add about 20%, $500 probably.

 

[daglesj]

People, as mentioned a few times already do not see DDR3/DDR5 etc. etc. as you would standard PC components and how they perform in a standard PC.

1. These will be CUSTOM parts. Not standard PC fare. 100% tailored and optimised to work with the entire consoles system.

2. They will not have to perform in a way that is hampered by standard PC layouts, designs and standards. Nor will their be any legacy issues that hamper standard PC hardware.

3. These boxes wont be running bog standard DirectX or Windows OS and all the legacy code etc. that gets in the way. It will be custom derivatives or similar.

4. These custom parts will all be hardwired and optimised on the board for direct connectivity and reduced latency etc.

So basically the hardware in both consoles will be able to run much faster and more efficiently than if it was in a top of the range PC.

Hence this is why the 360 and PS3 can still push out some decent looking games in 2013 while the old bog standard PC derivative 7800GT and X1900 that they were derived from have all been dumped years ago.

These are consoles. Normal PC performance rules DO NOT apply.

 

[Jacek Ringwelski]

I will buy the XBox One. I love the fact it's x86, will mean that it will make porting games between the new XBox and PC much easier.

 

[gggplaya]

this is good for end consumers. It means less exclusive Xbox and PS4 titles and more money for developers which have to spend less time porting between consoles and PC. Their code will have much much more commonality.
Ultimately the only exclusive titles will be the ones licensed by microsoft and sony to be exclusive.

 

[computertech82]

LOL!! Really sad when many cannot comprehend using a higher end video card with crappy ddr3 memory will DRAMATICALLY SLOW IT DOWN vs. a pc video card.
And with AMD so far behind intel, it's not even funny anymore. A Intel pc would be the REAL choice for gaming...PERIOD.

 

[quotas47]

"APU co-designed by AMD and Microsoft containing eight x86 CPU cores, "
x86? Next Generation architecture, eh?