Xbox 360 CPU vs other CPUs?

[jay_nar2012]

Woah! I stand corrected.
What's it capacity and throughput?

10 MiB, 256GB/s transfer rate, 500MHz clock

NEC designed eDRAM die includes additional logic (192 parallel pixel processors) for color, alpha compositing, Z/stencil buffering, and anti-aliasing called “Intelligent Memory”, giving developers 4-sample anti-aliasing at very little performance cost.

 

[amuffin]

:lol:

 

[jay_nar2012]

Anyone know whats going to be on the new consoles (ideas maybe).

 

[Pinhedd]

Anyone know whats going to be on the new consoles (ideas maybe).

There's been no official release so far. Seeing as how Microsoft loves to use portable APIs it's possible that the dev kits that are circulating may not reflect the final product at all.

My speculation is that we will see products that are very similar in design to the last generation. Say what you will about anaemic system specifications, there's no reason for them to reinvent the wheel when the last generation worked so well. They will be newer, they will be more powerful, but they will be fundamentally similar in design.

I have a feeling that AMD and IBM will be the winners again.

 

[jay_nar2012]

I heard rumors that Sony or Micro$oft might use AMD's APUs?

 

[Pinhedd]

I heard rumors that Sony or Micro$oft might use AMD's APUs?

I doubt it. The AMD APUs are having a massive identity crisis right now. They're targeted towards entry level users. They don't have enough compute power to take on the entry level Sandybridge processors at the same price point and they don't have enough graphical power to play games effectively. They're competing at a severe disadvantage. They're targeting an extremely narrow market and the sales numbers show it.

The current generation AMD APUs are barely on par with last generation's consoles. The A8-3870k's built in HD 6550D is at best half again as powerful as the 8 year old Xenos GPU in the XBox 360 and RSX GPU in the PS3 (they are remarkably similar in capabilities).

It took 6 years for Microsoft to combine the Xenon and Xenos into one chip. I don't see them castrating the next console that badly as a cost saving measure

 

[jay_nar2012]

HP are starting to sell desktops with A10 APUs...

They must be better than the A8,A6 and A4.

 

[FinneousPJ]

The current generation AMD APUs are barely on par with last generation's consoles. The A8-3870k's built in HD 6550D is at best half again as powerful as the 8 year old Xenos GPU in the XBox 360 and RSX GPU in the PS3 (they are remarkably similar in capabilities).

I disagree. Have a look at this graph, I'm pretty sure consoles do not run high settings at 60+ fps.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/T/343613/original/batman%201280.png

HP are starting to sell desktops with A10 APUs...

They must be better than the A8,A6 and A4.

They seem quite impressive to me.

EDIT: and furthermore, IF a console were to receive the APU, I'm sure optimizations would yield loads of extra performance over current PC games.

 

[Pinhedd]

I disagree. Have a look at this graph, I'm pretty sure consoles do not run high settings at 60+ fps.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/T/343613/original/batman%201280.png



They seem quite impressive to me.

EDIT: and furthermore, IF a console were to receive the APU, I'm sure optimizations would yield loads of extra performance over current PC games.

The new Trinity APUs are a very much needed improvement over Llano but that's still still high at 1280x720 (720p) which right now would occupy less than a quarter of my screenspace. 1920x1080 is the benchmark right now with 2560x1440 being the target and even the top end Trinity APUs are still mediocre at best at high resolutions and medium settings. If they want to use a single chip from the very beginning of the console lifecycle they have a long way to go.

Console optimizations don't do much for the GPU, it's mostly the CPU that benefits

 

[getochkn]

For the next gen, it could be anything. Hopefully sony listens to devs though and makes something easy to program, although that's been a grip with dev's since the PS2, so who knows. lol.

There has been rumors they may use an APU type chip and a dedicated graphics. Reason being APU is used in the dashboard for basic graphics, etc, less heat, less power draw, etc then switch to the dedicated for gaming. If it's a good enough APU, they could even use that for video play back, thus decreasing power and heat again.

As for comparing the chips in there to today's components, you can't really. They are designed different with different instructions, OS, etc. Look how hard it is to emulate this systems.

The fact that PS2 emulation can be finally run on a modern day multi-core, mega ram system shows they are very efficient at what they do. XBox 1 emulation has like 2 games working on it. If these system were soooo slow, we should be able to run them on todays system no problem, but we can't. XBox 360 or PS3, good luck.

 

[FinneousPJ]

The new Trinity APUs are a very much needed improvement over Llano but that's still still high at 1280x720 (720p) which right now would occupy less than a quarter of my screenspace. 1920x1080 is the benchmark right now with 2560x1440 being the target and even the top end Trinity APUs are still mediocre at best at high resolutions and medium settings. If they want to use a single chip from the very beginning of the console lifecycle they have a long way to go.

Console optimizations don't do much for the GPU, it's mostly the CPU that benefits

We're talking about console games. Currently they run often less than 720p and medium settings.

 

[jay_nar2012]

And usually upscaled.

 

[Pinhedd]

We're talking about console games. Currently they run often less than 720p and medium settings.

Yes they did, 8 years ago

 

[Pinhedd]

i think a lot of people are not understand and incorrectly using the term "upscale"

first going from 720p to 1080i is not an upscale, its basically a lateral move. in 720p (1280 x 720 on a HD set) you have 720 horizontal lines & 921,600 pixels

on 1080i (1920 x 540) you have 540 lines at 1,036,800 pixels, basically a minor increase

going to 1080p (1920 x1080) doubles the pixels at 2,073,600 pixels from 720p/1080i

those of us who game on PCs don't blink an eye since we live in worlds with monitors that are 900p, 1050p, 1080p, etc., one quick adjustment in the video menu lets us set everything up to our personal taste and a quick upgrade to our video card can alleviate most issue where the game is not performing to our graphic taste.

consoles have an entire new ball game. most TV monitors are still 720p & 1080i and that wont change in 2015. do you release a console then that supports 1080p? even if half the people can't use? even if most of the people that have a 1080p set can't tell the difference between 1080i & 1080p since they sit so far back from the set anyways? what happens when you release God of War 9 and Timmy plays at 45FPS on his 1080i set while Billy is struggling at 23FPS on his 1080p set and does not know why?

Most LCDs and Plasma displays support the 1080p format natively and deinterlace 1080i signals before displaying them. The 1080i format was native to early HD CRTs. 1080i is the preferred broadcast field format because it cuts down on the bandwidth that each channel consumes.

Regardless, the transmission resolution is independent of the internal resolution. Each 1080i frame corresponds to a different instant in time so the entire scene still needs to be computed twice regardless of whether or not its transmitted at 1080i or 1080p.

 

[whooleo]

You know I thought I explained console capability already a few posts back.......

 

[esrever]

Oh, your god, that was horribly wrong.
Link to this "lighting engine" ?

"Not only that but the memory architecture inside the xbox is far superior than the ps3" - lulwat? You do know the PS3 uses 256MB of GDDR3 and 256MB of Rambu XDR2 DRAM, right? - Monumentally faster!

"PS3 ran at 640p with no AA and lowered textures while the 360 ran at 720p with higher textures and 2x AA" - No, the Xbox does not have any form of modern AA; you just pulled this out your ass.

"The ps3 exclusives also look worse than the 360 exclusives" - Being that the only new (decent) exclusive is Halo, I'd like to see some proof.

"PS3's hardware is weaker on paper" - At what? Floating point arrhythmic, anisotropic filtering etc?

"The CPU can't effectively be coded for and the gpu is weaker than the 360's" - You probably meant to say something along the lines of "it's harder to develop on".

"It has no on die ram so there is never anti aliasing" - What your saying is completely insane. The Xbox does not have on "die" RAM, nor does that play any role what so ever with AA

All in all, looks like you pulled 95% of that from thin air.

No... just no. Im not going to argue with someone who is this indoctrinated.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Yea i thought that aswell Esrever.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Any ideas on the PS3 and Wii.

 

[InvalidError]

If it's a good enough APU, they could even use that for video play back, thus decreasing power and heat again.

Video playback does not require much of an APU to decode. On my 5 years old C2D-E8400, I can already simultaneously play back three 1080p streams in software. The Nexus7's Tegra3 can decode 1080p h264 without skipping a beat either when using GPU acceleration.

There may be somewhat of a challenge if we step things up to 4k h265.

 

[protokiller]

The ps3 renders the game at 720p but upscale it to 1080i, The xbox is the same.

That is true most of the time however some run at even less than 720P and are upscaled.

MW2=600P
Halo 3=640P

Some games are 1080P native on console but they are usually racing games and few and far between. Consoles don't have the video memory bandwith to easily do high resolution and the video cards have limited ROP's so rendering a lot of pixels kills performance.

 

[Smeg45]

What the next console won't have is native 1080p resolution with no upscaling and the equivalent of a 6870 in graphics grunt which is an average mid range PC now. It will still be heavily limited and already obsolete when its released. Good for AMD if its chosen again though.

 

[Pinhedd]

Any ideas on the PS3 and Wii.

I covered that in my post at the top of this thread, not sure if you saw it

 

[jay_nar2012]

Oh, guess i forgot...

Do you think Microsoft should make a portable console?

 

[Pinhedd]

Oh, guess i forgot...

Do you think Microsoft should make a portable console?

Perhaps, but not at the moment. They've currently got Windows 8, the next XBox, and the Surface tablets in their product pipeline.

Many people say that the handheld market is dying in favor of tablets and while there is evidence to support this I believe that the reason for the market failure is mostly due to negligence on part of Sony and Nintendo to leverage the platform on the latest devices. The PSVita is an amazingly powerful handheld but has only a bunch of crummy sports games available for it right now. The 3DS didn't see wide success because it didn't improve sufficiently over the DS Lite.

Microsoft would be very wise to bring XNA to a handheld market with actual buttons rather than the prolific and unresponsive touchpads that we have right now. However, it would have to be positioned properly in a market that actually has room for such a device and right now it doesn't.

 

[jay_nar2012]

Wonder if apple design a console (and name it something stupid like iplay or something).