Blowing the whistle on AMDs Flute.

Uvaman2

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https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-flute-benchmarks-spotted-could-this-be-powering-xbox-scarlett

From the article:
According to the benchmark results, the AMD Flute SoC will come with eight Zen 2 cores, 16 threads and SMT capability.

Interestingly, the base clock speed of the Flute SoC is just 1.6GHz, which is pretty low these days, with a maximum boost of 3.2GHz.

This suggests that the Flute SoC will be a low-power part for use in compact systems – such as a games console, and is similar to AMD’s Jaguar SoC which powered the Xbox One.

While on paper the Flute SoC’s processor doesn’t sound too impressive – especially when compared to modern desktop PCs’ CPUs – it looks like the Flute CPU will be at least two times faster than previous-generation Jaguar SoCs, and will be a big upgrade over the dated 28nm Jaguar SoCs found in the original Xbox One and PS4.

The Flute SoC is also expected to be 7nm, which will also bring power benefits.

As a system-on-a-chip, the AMD Flute looks like it comes with a graphics processing unit (GPU) as well, though clues about the graphics capabilities are harder to find. Apparently, it will be based on ‘NAVI 10LITE’ – which has been mentioned before when unreleased AMD Navi GPUs showed up in a Linux driver.
.......
So a Navi 10 Lite.... and this will do ray tracing with no or less than RTX loss?
How? I wonder if there is additional hardware for raytracing.... Or if its baked in Navi already, and it will be enabled later for the 5700 cards sold now?
 
The processor is exactly whet I said it would be 6 months ago, when they were first announced.

An all-core sustained boost of 2.8 to 3.0 gives you enough performance improvement TODAY, plus ability to do a midlife upgrade just like Jaguar. Those low clocks reduce power and also improve the yields of the first gen parts.

The best thoughts I can give on Navi lite with raytracing is that:

1. This PS5 part won't be released for a year and a half, so don't automatically assume this is the same architecture as the RX 5700; that part was finalized almost a year ago, while this is being developed today...plenty of time to add tweaks to do RT before release.

2, Navi 10 has no raytracing, while Navi 20 (the same architecture that will be used for the PS5) will - this is a fact confirmed by AMD, and there are no secrets left on the die.

So we should see Navi 20 a year from now with raytracing, then 6 months later PS5, then Shortly after the release of PS5, we will probably see a Navi 10 refresh with raytracing added.

So yeah, you''re going to have to wait two more years for AMD to have an answer across-the-board to RTX. Hope you'r e not dead-set on playing RTX games until then?
 
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So a Navi 10 Lite.... and this will do ray tracing with no or less than RTX loss?
How? I wonder if there is additional hardware for raytracing....

There has to be- and that hardware may not be in currently released Navi GPUs. The loss will be lessened through very, very careful ground up implementations, something no title has yet been released with. We're likely to see all kinds of tricks that aren't going to hold up to scrutiny but will otherwise be a step-up for console peasants.
 
No matter what leaks have come... I'm still pretty sure navi will be using wave32 calculations to do shader based hybrid tracing.

Will the current Navis be capable of that... I can't see why not. But plans change and AMD would be stupid to talk about software features that won't be around for months and perhaps a year, and could end up not becoming reality.

It's possible their SOC will feature a third chilet aimed at doing ray tracing stuff... who knows. I am just not convinced. Their rdna arch is clearly designed to do lots of low precision shader calculations. Outside of ray tracing I don't see all that many other reasons to design it that way.

Tracing or not though. I am looking forward to seeing what zen2 + a navi chiplet can do. AMDs current apus are surprisingly capable 1080p gaming machines. I imagine zen2 + navi lite chiplets could easily be a ultra setting 1080p part... and perhaps dare we dream even 1440 high settings with fast ram.
 
https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-flute-benchmarks-spotted-could-this-be-powering-xbox-scarlett
While on paper the Flute SoC’s processor doesn’t sound too impressive – especially when compared to modern desktop PCs’ CPUs – it looks like the Flute CPU will be at least two times faster than previous-generation Jaguar SoCs, and will be a big upgrade over the dated 28nm Jaguar SoCs found in the original Xbox One and PS4.

Does this guy not understand the fundamental difference in a SoC and a motherboard+CPU desktop computer? Who is writing this stuff? 12 year old girls??
 
https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-flute-benchmarks-spotted-could-this-be-powering-xbox-scarlett

From the article:
According to the benchmark results, the AMD Flute SoC will come with eight Zen 2 cores, 16 threads and SMT capability.

Interestingly, the base clock speed of the Flute SoC is just 1.6GHz, which is pretty low these days, with a maximum boost of 3.2GHz.

This suggests that the Flute SoC will be a low-power part for use in compact systems – such as a games console, and is similar to AMD’s Jaguar SoC which powered the Xbox One.

While on paper the Flute SoC’s processor doesn’t sound too impressive – especially when compared to modern desktop PCs’ CPUs – it looks like the Flute CPU will be at least two times faster than previous-generation Jaguar SoCs, and will be a big upgrade over the dated 28nm Jaguar SoCs found in the original Xbox One and PS4.

The Flute SoC is also expected to be 7nm, which will also bring power benefits.

As a system-on-a-chip, the AMD Flute looks like it comes with a graphics processing unit (GPU) as well, though clues about the graphics capabilities are harder to find. Apparently, it will be based on ‘NAVI 10LITE’ – which has been mentioned before when unreleased AMD Navi GPUs showed up in a Linux driver.
.......
So a Navi 10 Lite.... and this will do ray tracing with no or less than RTX loss?
How? I wonder if there is additional hardware for raytracing.... Or if its baked in Navi already, and it will be enabled later for the 5700 cards sold now?


Navi 10 has RDNA(1), and future generations of Navi will have RDNA(2). It is a scalable and modular architecture and feature sets can be added, each spin.

AMD has yet bought in the 5800 & 5900 Series Radeons. Which I expect to start to support basic levels of real time ray-tracing, without a hit in performance. So I would assume the Consoles SOC will also get hardware support for basic ray tracing.
 
Interestingly, the base clock speed of the Flute SoC is just 1.6GHz, which is pretty low these days, with a maximum boost of 3.2GHz.

Really , that´s a generous base clock , you don´t need 3GHz while it´s sitting there doing nothing.
The old Phenom II used to downclock in idle state to 800MHz , this article is terrible
 
Really , that´s a generous base clock , you don´t need 3GHz while it´s sitting there doing nothing.
The old Phenom II used to downclock in idle state to 800MHz , this article is terrible
It's not really telling us much of anything other than 1.6GHz is the minimum stable speed it has to run at with full load in a dusty air-constricted case inside a cabinet next to a DVR/receiver that's also producing some heat. If this same SoC was included on a standardized mini-ITX motherboard for system builders I'm sure we would find with good cooling they are capable of more. If the next generation of consoles has something like PBO built-in... we will see them getting modded?
 
It's not really telling us much of anything other than 1.6GHz is the minimum stable speed it has to run at with full load in a dusty air-constricted case inside a cabinet next to a DVR/receiver that's also producing some heat. If this same SoC was included on a standardized mini-ITX motherboard for system builders I'm sure we would find with good cooling they are capable of more. If the next generation of consoles has something like PBO built-in... we will see them getting modded?

Good point on PBO. Being ryzen 2 / navi based it would seem logical they will have PBO. I look forward to the tales of people modding inexpensive AIO CPU water blocks for their XboxNextOneTwo and PS5s... might help sustain those boosts as long as required.
 
Odd... I feel like 3.2ghz 8/16 is respectable. Not sure if the 1.6 was the lowest @ idle or just lowest it would run while actually running heavy loads.
 
Odd... I feel like 3.2ghz 8/16 is respectable. Not sure if the 1.6 was the lowest @ idle or just lowest it would run while actually running heavy loads.
Something like that running in a short 1U form factor as a firewall or network traffic analyzer would be great. Give it a crap load of HDD space and it would be the perfect chip to run Panorama off of. Could also work nicely as small onsite AD server I can think of lots of cases where I can use a small low power system that has a lot of cores.
 
Hey kyle I'm calling ya out. Get the hell out here to Hawaii. we wants take ya'all fishing. My treat.
 
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Good point on PBO. Being ryzen 2 / navi based it would seem logical they will have PBO. I look forward to the tales of people modding inexpensive AIO CPU water blocks for their XboxNextOneTwo and PS5s... might help sustain those boosts as long as required.

That does have me wondering though, Microsoft said for the first time, there is room for a two-tier console system.

I wonder if some of these SKUs are the mainstream Xbox, and the bigger OC one..?
 
Of this is anywhere close to what we'll see in future consoles, multi threading in games is going to have to improve vastly to use all of these cores to their max.
 
Well don't forget they are just reducing the NG the cost for the fancy overlay to games and other background tasks that will be watching and listening to you. ;) on top of multithreaded readed games.
 
I have a hard time seeing consoles having PBO or any other kind of overclocking officially enabled... in PC land it makes sense because IQ is variable and framerate is unlocked but what good would 10-15% higher than normal clocks do on a system that's running fixed IQ and locked framerate**? Consoles provide a guaranteed level of performance at carefully selected IQ levels; building in the possibility for a small subset of gamers to modestly increase their consoles clocks seems like it would either ruin that minimum guaranteed performance if the system was built around overclocking, or provide no real benefit if it wasn't.

** I know that Freesync and dynamic resolution scaling are things on consoles now, still doesn't change the "fixed IQ fixed performance" paridigm
 
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I have a hard time seeing consoles having PBO or any other kind of overclocking officially enabled... in PC land it makes sense because IQ is variable and framerate is unlocked but what good would 10-15% higher than normal clocks do on a system that's running fixed IQ and locked framerate**? Consoles provide a guaranteed level of performance at carefully selected IQ levels; building in the possibility for a small subset of gamers to modestly increase their consoles clocks seems like it would either ruin that minimum guaranteed performance if the system was built around overclocking, or provide no real benefit if it wasn't.

** I know that Freesync and dynamic resolution scaling are things on consoles now, still doesn't change the "fixed IQ fixed performance" paridigm
Why would they run fixed frame rates.... That hasn't been a thing in a long while. Also, ramping down clocks and running faster on some cores can help if something doesn't need the power or needs only one or two cores instead of all of them. Both next gen consoles will support freesync, and like I said, fixed frame rates went out a long time ago.
 
Of this is anywhere close to what we'll see in future consoles, multi threading in games is going to have to improve vastly to use all of these cores to their max.


Well yes, but for the Jaguar generation, it took 2 years for the first console ports to scale to 6 cores (Fallout 4 was one of the first, with about 25% scaling beyond 4 threads,) and another year to get the full performance out of those extra corers.


The question is: how long of a delay will it be before we get the first game to exceed 6 major threads on the new system? Having double the performance per-core is going to make the first couple years of new console life easy, and so we may see similar (or longer) delays!
 
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As far as x86 and multicore... One could argue multicore just started for x86.
Software will only get better and faster in x86.
We got to remember x86 had years of easy speed gains solely in hardware.. some mhz more meant faster computing over and over. The dual core started, but its been slow... I think that now multicore is hitting its stride on x86.
 
PBO in a console?? Wishful thinking.

Consoles have limited, specific cooling, and need to be able to survive in a home theater cabinet... They don't come in AIB flavors like the EVGA Xbox 2 Triforce! With Triple fans! or the Gigabyte PS5 Windforce!

This is even assuming that the CPU in the console has the PBO feature... nothing I have seen says that it will.
 
My gu
Well yes, but for the Jaguar generation, it took 2 years for the first console ports to scale to 6 cores (Fallout 4 was one of the first, with about 25% scaling beyond 4 threads,) and another year to get the full performance out of those extra corers.


The question is: how long of a delay will it be before we get the first game to exceed 6 major threads on the new system? Having double the performance per-core is going to make the first couple years of new console life easy, and so we may see similar (or longer) delays!
My guess is that they are much more comfortable with threading and libraries to do so are more mature, so hopefully it doesn't take near as long. The issue remains, there are only so many components to a game/engine to perform at once depending on the game of course. Some game types may not benefit from more threads and others will benefit more of course.
 
PBO in a console?? Wishful thinking.

Consoles have limited, specific cooling, and need to be able to survive in a home theater cabinet... They don't come in AIB flavors like the EVGA Xbox 2 Triforce! With Triple fans! or the Gigabyte PS5 Windforce!

This is even assuming that the CPU in the console has the PBO feature... nothing I have seen says that it will.
Nothing of what you said specifically limits pbo... It just won't hit as high of loads as something designed for desktop. Can still use pbo to boost performance, it just has to stay within it's limits (which would be lower limits than a properly cooled desktop, but that doesnt mean it has nothing).
 
BTW.. not saying it will or won't have 'pbo', but I'm pretty sure it will be able to scale the frequency of all cores and possibly individual cores within a specific limit... And by definitive, that's what pbo does.
 
Does this guy not understand the fundamental difference in a SoC and a motherboard+CPU desktop computer? Who is writing this stuff? 12 year old girls??
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