8th Generation Countdown

[storm20200]

(05-22-2013, 05:30 AM)Zee530 Wrote: Sooo, who's up for writing an emulator for this
Still an 8-core CPU is over-kill in my opinion, i wonder what they'll put in their next console.

Damn it! I was going to say "how long before someone asks if Dolphin will emulate the Xbox One?"

Overall disappointing reveal imo, just another bit of the same from the consoles and those games all just reminded me of how Crysis looks at max settings and that was released in 2007

[Starscream]

I don't need Sony or Microsoft to build me a sub-par gaming machine, I want to personally buy my hardware and make it what I want it to be.

Game developers: Stop creating games for proprietary hardware. Computer hardware that the average guy can buy and use is widely available in the world, use that.

[NaturalViolence]

Congratulations Microsoft, you've done it again:

[Shonumi]

@Garteal - I would have liked to have seen some mention of how the Xbox One affects Indie devs. MS is really the only company allowing people to do that sort of stuff (just became easier since Sony now doesn't charge indie devs for making games on the Vita). I'd also like them to officially put to rest rumors of always-on and used games.

[NaturalViolence]

Garteal Wrote:One delroth is not sufficient. We need more delroths to work in parallel to even come close to it.

Ok, I have the solution guys. We start opening up inter-dimensional tears and kidnapping delroths from parallel dimensions. After we have hundreds of them we carefully remove their brains and fuse them together into a massive neural network. Then encase it inside a starship to act as a body.

The down side is that this new sentient starship will likely find a way to kill us all. But the good side is that before that we'll be able to enjoy Xbox One emulation at fullspeed.

Zee530 Wrote:Still an 8-core CPU is over-kill in my opinion, i wonder what they'll put in their next console.

Garteal Wrote:Nah, it's not, especially considering the fact that they had to go with lower clockspeeds. I'm glad they went with more cores, albeit at the loss of a higher clockspeed.
Still. This allows for more stuff to be calculated on the CPU or improvements on things like AI, rendering (more enemies on screen), etc.

*NaturalViolence slowly begins to realize that nobody seems to understand how slow a jaguar core running at 1.6GHz is.

You're basically looking at a pipeline with an IPC similar to K8 (athlon 64) running at 1.6GHz.....yeah. Even under the impossible theoretical scenario of the cpu running a workload with all 8 cores doing perfect load balancing the best possible performance you would get would be equivalent to a phenom I X4 at 3GHz. Your outdated phenom II 955 3.2 GHz would utterly crush it in every test that you threw at it no matter how heavily multithreaded it was.

So why did they use this architecture? Because it's cheap. They're trying to have one moderate sized chip that contains both the GPU (IGP) and CPU instead of two separate large chips like the previous generation had. In addition to reducing cost this also has the added benefits of :
1. Lowering power consumption
Which also reduces the amount of cooling needed, the noise generated by the cooling system, the cost since the power supply can be made weaker and the size since the power supply can be made weaker (both the power brick and the regulator).
2. Simplifying cooling
One chip to cool instead of two. This also has the added benefit of further reducing size and cost.
3. Making the motherboard smaller and simpler
Which improves reliability, reduces the size of the system further, and reduces cost further.
4. Allowing fast and simple communication between the GPU and CPU
Which in turn makes it easier for them to share one memory space which is an important optimization for video games.

And probably more....

Since they're emphasizing graphics being that this is a video game console most of that one chips die area is dedicated to the GPU (if I had to guess something like 75% of it based on the specs they've given us) in order to pack as much GPU horsepower into it as possible. The same thing goes for power consumption/heat. They have a certain "power budget" for the chip based on the limitations of their cooling system. They will of course dedicate most of that power budget to the GPU once again to maximize 3D rendering performance. This means very little die area and power is left for the cpu side. To maximize what little they had and at least get decent performance out of it with the type of workloads being done they chose to use 8 very small/power efficient cores running at low clock rates. This of course shifts some design burden onto the programmers in exchange for getting more theoretical maximum performance out of the chip.

Of course this thing has a better cache subsystem than a desktop jaguar cpu but it also will have much higher memory latencies which should even things out. With such a slow pipeline there is not much the cache can do to improve things.

[Garteal]

(05-22-2013, 07:44 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: After we have hundreds of them we carefully remove their brains and fuse them together into a massive neural network. Then encase it inside a starship to act as a body.

Wait, w-we? No, YOU will remove their brains and weld it to a starship.
Be glad. You can sacrifice yourself for the greater good. You'll have done something good in your life for once. [color=transparent];P[/color]

Quote:*NaturalViolence slowly begins to realize that nobody seems to understand how slow a jaguar core running at 1.6GHz is.

Nobody said it was fast. Zee just thought having 8 cores was overkill without taking the architecture and clockspeed in consideration.
Of course it will be ridiculously slow if you compare it to the desktop CPU's, especially to what we have now.

Quote:So why did they use this architecture? Because it's cheap.

Obviously.

Quote:They're trying to have one moderate sized chip that contains both the GPU (IGP) and CPU instead of two separate large chips like the previous generation had. In addition to reducing cost this also has the added benefits of :
1. Lowering power consumption
Which also reduces the amount of cooling needed, the noise generated by the cooling system, the cost since the power supply can be made weaker and the size since the power supply can be made weaker (both the power brick and the regulator).
2. Simplifying cooling
One chip to cool instead of two. This also has the added benefit of further reducing size and cost.
3. Making the motherboard smaller and simpler
Which improves reliability, reduces the size of the system further, and reduces cost further.
4. Allowing fast and simple communication between the GPU and CPU
Which in turn makes it easier for them to share one memory space which is an important optimization for video games.

And probably more....

Yeah... Unfortunately the console (atleast the ones they have showcased) is huge.
Looks like a very old Dell case or something.

[NaturalViolence]

Garteal Wrote:You'll have done something good in your life for once.

I literally cannot believe I was able to type that into google images and actually find a relevant image. God I love the internet.

Garteal Wrote:Nobody said it was fast. Zee just thought having 8 cores was overkill without taking the architecture and clockspeed in consideration.

In other words he thought it would be fast.....

You then explained to him that it wasn't and I elaborated on that.

[KHRZ]

RIP gaming

First companies stopped caring about making complex and interesting new gameplay, now they don't care about pushing graphics either. I remember seeing better graphics than this at least 5 years ago. Seems comapnies want gaming to settle with some proven cash formula like the movie industry.

[Zee530]

Capitalism ftw! :3

[MayImilae]

Quote:MS is really the only company allowing people to do that sort of stuff (just became easier since Sony now doesn't charge indie devs for making games on the Vita).

Wrongo. The Playstation Store is now reaching out to devs (literally, they are calling devs) to get games onto the playstation ecosystem. The PS3, Vita, and PS4 are very indie friendly now. The Wii U has phenomenal indie development, which has recieved tremendous praise as being as good as steam, but on a console. Xbox? The Xbox 360 has gotten worse, not better. The Xbox Live Arcade is a ghost town, and developers have been left with a terrible taste in their mouths. And the XNA program has been cancelled, with no replacement forthcoming. And there is zero word about the Xbox One and Indies, though the Xbox One reveal barely mentioned games at all, so...