Very Interesting read regarding upcoming consoles

[scottchen]

Hey Action man i agree with your points, the R500 does look very promising, i just don't like to use the word revolutionary very often, i think in this case, the r500 is best described as evolutionary.


LOL and my previous post was to simply take what you said out of context, therefore questioning your credibility Sorry that's what we've been learning in political science, so have to use it somewhere

 

[Action_Man]

Revolutionary certainly does get thrown around way too much. I do think this will be alot of chnage especially in the low and mid range cards. Either way it'll be very interesting.

Sorry that's what we've been learning in political science, so have to use it somewhere

hahaha.

Some people are like slinkies....
Not really good for anything but you cant help smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.

 

[scottchen]

Very interesting indeed, considering the fact that ATI's having production problems with the "simpler" R520, i wander what kind of delay and problems they're going to run into with the R500.

 

[Action_Man]

Well actually the R520 is the more complex chip, its 300-350 million transistors and the R500 is 232 million and 105 for the eDRAM and some logic and being in different packages should help improve yields a fair bit.

Some people are like slinkies....
Not really good for anything but you cant help smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Interesting overview by ARStechnica about the AT article;

<A HREF="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html" target="_new">http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050629-5054.html</A>

Interesting viewpoints on the CPU side of things, nothing about the VPUs unfortunately.

I like the comment about the 'free ride' as I think that's necessarily so. The only way to make consoles truely forward looking was to approach it from a multi-thread/core environment and if your going to be stuck with a single design for a while, might as well overdesign to some extent if the cost factor isn't that much more, because unlike PCs you won't get a second chance to add a physX engine or better sound processor later.

I still find the whole thing hillarious from the standpoint of the article still being pulled but it's all over the place.

Also interesting that in this month's CPU mag, Anand praises the move to HD in his article: <i>"The move to HD is so critical for the Xbox 360; I can't believe that it is 2005 and we still don't have a console that has games rendered at higher resolutions than 640x480"</i> Yet you get the feel from this pulled AT article that it's not as important due to his pull back on 1080P. And since there is no mention of the PS3/RSX you see a slightly different view of the Xenos and it's benifits (eDRAM get a bit better shake).

Reading the CPU magazine bit you definitely get a different feel than this AT pulled article.


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <A HREF="http://www.redgreen.com/" target="_new"><font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red></A> GA to SK

 

[scottchen]

I was very interested in the comment that the 3.2Ghz clocked processor will only be equivalent 2x performance of the original xbox, which was a Celeron/P3 hybrid at 733mhz, so that makes the Xenon equivalent a Willamette P4 1.4Ghz?

 

[Guest]

Why is it that I posted that in the CPU forums and got almsot no reply lol!.

That comment shocked me too, but they're talking about single threaded performance I think.
Now my question is do developpers really need more than 2X CPU power right now?
In 3 years down the road this power wont be enough but by then games should become more multi threaded and they should be able to take better advantage of the triple core.

In a heavily multi threaded environment im sure this CPU will do much more than 2X the performance of that hybrid old cpu...

Asus P4P800DX, P4C 2.6ghz@3.25ghz, 2X512 OCZ PC4000 3-4-4-8, MSI 6800Ultra stock, 2X30gig Raid0

 

[scottchen]

I knew they were talking about in a single threaded environment, or a hyperthreaded environment. But still, that is a horrible 3.2Ghz, that means a dothan 1.4Ghz totally destroys it.

A step up in cores and clock frequency, but a huge step back in architecture, that article sorta explained how they could pack 3 cores into such a small die.

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Here's the funny thing about the CPU performance (ironic considering chastized someone for talking CPU in GPU forum ), is that while it may perform only 2X as well as the previous Xbox core, but really think about what it will be handling. The core will be doing physics, sound, networking, AI, etc. Now if propely programmed you don't need a 5ghz P4 to do all that, but preferably a bunch of slower procs that could dedicate themselves to those tasks. Overall I'd rather have the equivalent 6 x 1.4 ghz or even 1ghz cores that can be dynamically assigned the task that when combined seem to clobber even the strongest CPUs in current titles.

I like ARStechnica's view that you really can't comment on the power until you have the games actually working on these parrallel setups.

The other thing AT seems to forget is that while it was possible to make it with a dual core P4 or AMD64, that's the way to guarantee that eventually a PC will have more power than itself. When going the parrallel route it makes it a little difficult to compare, and to really achieve parity you would need more than just a dual core CPU. Of course the move to quad core may make that a moot point, but really I think that the issues involved with coding for these system are very similar if not the same as those that the developers will have to face when coding for the X2 and PentiumD.

Also WTF, is it really THAT easy right now porting games from PC to PS2? 'Cause that doesn't seem to have kept them from building the largest library out there.


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <A HREF="http://www.redgreen.com/" target="_new"><font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red></A> GA to SK

 

[eden]

Not necessarily, if the cores are built using an EPIC-like architecture. You can have so much less transistors and wasted die space when going that route, yet still achieve stuff like two-fold+ performance improvements in FP, as seen with the Itanium 2.

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[abhishekghosh333]

the PS4 may use more number of SPE's on their cell architecture ....

i think the wii 2 will be releasing sometime soon ... can be in this year too .. hope so ! m eager to see some new hardware ...

here r some info on probable release dates & features wii 2 & others

Wii 2 release date & features
http://techtadka.net/articles/gadget/186-wii-2-release-date-and-features.html

PS4 release date & features
http://techtadka.net/articles/gadget/183-playstation-4-release-date-and-features.html

XBox 720 release date & features
http://techtadka.net/articles/gadget/185-xbox-720-release-date-and-features.html


PSP 2 release date & features
http://techtadka.net/articles/gadget/187-psp-2-release-date-and-features.html

 

[djcoolmasterx]

Nice bump dumbass.