Is AMD's Ryzen CPU the Game-Changer for Next-Gen Consoles?

Megalith

Megalith

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Arguably, CPUs in consoles have not offered a true generational leap since the PS3 and Xbox 360 days, but that is expected to change when Sony and Microsoft look to Ryzen for their future game systems. This article proposes that significant improvements in simulation (i.e., world generation) are required to take games to the next level, and this feat may only be accomplished with better CPU technology: GPU advancements are not the only factor.

Microsoft has customized Jaguar for Xbox One X…but it's still a CPU of the same generation with the same fundamental limits in place. It's an open secret that AMD's Ryzen architecture is the way forward, and the smart money is on one Zen CCX module containing four cores running eight threads making up the CPU component of the next-gen APUs in the PC space. Implementation will vary - perhaps dramatically so on a console - but the current Ryzen processors are based on two CCXs in a single package, opening the door to four, six and eight core processors, depending on which bits AMD chooses to disable.
 
What about heat, power consumption and cost? A SoC based on Ryzen and a faster GPU will be pretty large as well, you would think anyway.
 
Well, I don't know the exact TDP of the APUs in the consoles, but the original PS4 has a total power supply rated at 250W. Slim edition dropped that to 230W, and Pro edition raised it to 310W. Original XB1 was 253W. I don't have any data for the S or X editions. The largest PSU that I know of in a console was the PS3 Original, which weighed in at 380W.

Now that's PSU rating, but you know that's going to be closely related to power draw, and the biggest player in that is going to be the APU - maybe at ~1/3 of the total rating, just a guess there. Just going off PSU ratings, at ~250W we are looking at something roughly that is slightly higher than the power requirement of most high-end gaming laptops.

Would it be possible to build a console with a larger power draw? Certainly. Desktop PC's do it all the time. The tradeoff is going to be something that's in a bigger box and/or possibly makes more noise. Console trends have shown that bigger isn't better (hence all these "Slim" editions that come out), but players keep claiming they want more performance. I guess sales of PS4Pro and XB1X will show if that's really true or not.

Ryzen could be in the next gen of consoles. But I think it's got a equal shot at going back to a custom PowerPC again, a high performance ARM variant, or maybe something else entirely. Once you jump generations, all bets are off, and the console manufacturers are going to re-evaluate their options and go with what they think will be the best bet for long-term support of that console generation. Ryzen represents a good step forward for AMD, but I think ARM right now presents a very good challenge to that, and PPC has always been a strong option. Heck, even Intel may make a play there again, even though they have traditionally not been a strong competitior in low margin markets.
 
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Brian_B said:
Well, I don't know the exact TDP of the APUs in the consoles, but the original PS4 has a total power supply rated at 250W. Slim edition dropped that to 230W, and Pro edition raised it to 310W. Original XB1 was 253W. I don't have any data for the S or X editions. The largest PSU that I know of in a console was the PS3 Original, which weighed in at 380W.

Now that's PSU rating, but you know that's going to be closely related to power draw, and the biggest player in that is going to be the APU - maybe at ~1/3 of the total rating, just a guess there. Just going off PSU ratings, at ~250W we are looking at something roughly that is slightly higher than the power requirement of most high-end gaming laptops.

Would it be possible to build a console with a larger power draw? Certainly. Desktop PC's do it all the time. The tradeoff is going to be something that's in a bigger box and/or possibly makes more noise. Console trends have shown that bigger isn't better (hence all these "Slim" editions that come out), but players keep claiming they want more performance. I guess sales of PS4Pro and XB1X will show if that's really true or not.

Ryzen could be in the next gen of consoles. But I think it's got a equal shot at going back to a custom PowerPC again, a high performance ARM variant, or maybe something else entirely. Once you jump generations, all bets are off, and the console manufacturers are going to re-evaluate their options and go with what they think will be the best bet for long-term support of that console generation. Ryzen represents a good step forward for AMD, but I think ARM right now presents a very good challenge to that, and PPC has always been a strong option. Heck, even Intel may make a play there again, even though they have traditionally not been a strong competitior in low margin markets.
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The issue with changing back to PowerPC or something like that is that you then lose one of the things that have been there for developers recently and that is the ease of porting from a x86 to x86 system. The Xbox system now runs windows as its base OS. there is going to be gains and loses jumping to something else now.
 
I think a ryzen apu would be a good idea for new consoles. Problem is Scorpio is going miss it, its too far along they won't redesign it now. Who knows about PS5. Jaguar isn't terrible but its slow and holding everything back.
 
They need 8 cores. 2 CCXes is ~100mm2 and uses a fair bit of power. The 8 Jaguar cores are most likely not much more than 12-15mm2.

And GCN is falling so far behind that the one who drops it will frog leap the other console maker in GPU performance and/or console size and power usage.

With the current path A75 looks like a better candidate and AMD can use that as well. And unlike Zen or Jaguar, A75 can do 8 cores in a mesh without penalties.
 
I hope so, the more money AMD gets, the more competition they will provide intel and nvidia.

Go AMD!

(Until they turn into dicks, then we go back to whoever are their enemies!)
 
Burticus said:
I think a ryzen apu would be a good idea for new consoles. Problem is Scorpio is going miss it, its too far along they won't redesign it now. Who knows about PS5. Jaguar isn't terrible but its slow and holding everything back.
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whether or not we see a ryzen based console any time soon will hinge on the performance of scorpio.. if the performance is there and it allows them to use that console model for the next 3-4 years then we'll probably be a few generations into ryzen before we ever see a console using it. if the performance is marginal and will only work with the current generation of games then sure there's a possibility we'll see it sooner. my gut feeling is that we won't see anything for a few years though because microsoft and sony still need to make their money back on this generation and constantly upgrading eventually leaves a sour taste for casual console owners.


Brian_B said:
Well, I don't know the exact TDP of the APUs in the consoles, but the original PS4 has a total power supply rated at 250W. Slim edition dropped that to 230W, and Pro edition raised it to 310W. Original XB1 was 253W. I don't have any data for the S or X editions. The largest PSU that I know of in a console was the PS3 Original, which weighed in at 380W.

Now that's PSU rating, but you know that's going to be closely related to power draw, and the biggest player in that is going to be the APU - maybe at ~1/3 of the total rating, just a guess there. Just going off PSU ratings, at ~250W we are looking at something roughly that is slightly higher than the power requirement of most high-end gaming laptops.

Would it be possible to build a console with a larger power draw? Certainly. Desktop PC's do it all the time. The tradeoff is going to be something that's in a bigger box and/or possibly makes more noise. Console trends have shown that bigger isn't better (hence all these "Slim" editions that come out), but players keep claiming they want more performance. I guess sales of PS4Pro and XB1X will show if that's really true or not.

Ryzen could be in the next gen of consoles. But I think it's got a equal shot at going back to a custom PowerPC again, a high performance ARM variant, or maybe something else entirely. Once you jump generations, all bets are off, and the console manufacturers are going to re-evaluate their options and go with what they think will be the best bet for long-term support of that console generation. Ryzen represents a good step forward for AMD, but I think ARM right now presents a very good challenge to that, and PPC has always been a strong option. Heck, even Intel may make a play there again, even though they have traditionally not been a strong competitior in low margin markets.
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in the case of consoles power usage is at the bottom of the list of criteria's, performance and cooling are the priorities which indirectly effect the total power usage.. ultimately it's about how much performance can you get out of it while keeping it cool and using the least amount of moving parts to do it. it's just a big ass laptop with a controller instead of a keyboard after all.

if you want a power efficient console, go buy a Nintendo, it'll never get turned on so there's your power saving ;)
 
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Drop the clocks on Ryzen to 2.0 GHz on the 4 core 8 thread and it is almost doable now!
By the time the console makers get to that next level, AMD will be on the next node, and or a very efficient Ryzen2 with HBM enabled APU's with all the Vega baked in goodness for custom consoles, not just some of the features glued on Polaris for XBoxOneX.
 
Meeho said:
Why?
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1 or 2 cores will go to the OS as dedicated to begin with. So even if you imagine a quad core. You are left with 2 or 3. Also PR wise its going to be hard to sell less cores.
 
I doubt 99% of console owners know their core count and 4/8 should be more than enough for some time, especially if it enables a beefier GPU.
 
Meeho said:
I doubt 99% of console owners know their core count and 4/8 should be more than enough for some time, especially if it enables a beefier GPU.
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Even so, your next issues is power consumption and die sizes. Specially to reach the desired performance.

I think all us PC users would love to see consoles with fast big cores due to the limitations they add in games with the small cores. But look at Scorpio, a dedicated style workaround for some of the load is preferred.

Its going to be very hard to avoid the A75 in the next consoles. And its going to be even harder to avoid going for a faster, more efficient and smaller GPU architecture.
 
Meeho said:
How does A75 compare to Jaguar and 2.x GHz 4/8 Ryzen?
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I would guess A75 is 50% faster than Jaguar clock for clock and clock around the same without having any cluster penalty and obviously more efficient.

For Ryzen you can just compare against Jaguar. But you are avoiding the 2 biggest issues with it. TDP and die size. Same reason why FX wasn't used in consoles either or any other big core. If it was so easy Cats cores and Atom cores would never exist. A 2Ghz Zen isn't exactly fast either so it would be a very big compromise.

Atom(1.6/2.56Ghz) vs KBL(1.3/3.6Ghz) for example gives you 8 cores vs 2C/4T in roughly the same TDP.
 
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I found the whole video disingenuous. It pre empts on pc while in reality none of the pc engines would work on 8 (7) core jaguar. Nor can you compare both ecosystems one is optimized between 2 (cpu gpu)pieces of hardware and the other will work on any hardware.

Where you don't know what is going on in the PS4 engine and how well it is optimized. It is the same story for games that were still running on the older platform but also poorly optimized those games will always be there, the switch to Zen cores would not work for those anyway.

The odd thing is he admits this when he shows Horizon zero dawn.

That makes the whole cpu debate something which I have my doubts on, there just less optimized engines and more optimized engines rather then a cpu deficiency to start with. I'm not saying that there won't be any improvements just saying that there will always be more poorly optimized games then better optimized games.
 
Horizon Zero Dawn?!

That alone warrants the video thrown out, you do NOT compare different console systems by using exclusives, because you have NOTHING to compare it to on other platforms.
 
Even if the PS5 uses the same RX-570-class GPU-side as the PS4-Pro and just has a Ryzen-based CPU-side and 12-16GB of ram, it would ROFL-Stomp the XBOne-X. Bear in mind, that would be like comparing a 2.3Ghz FX-8350 + GTX 1070(XBOne-X) to a Ryzen 5 1500x + RX-570 (PS5),
 
Yes, it will be an improvement.

Except it will be the Playstation 4 Ultra Pro Plus++, released in 2020. Or the Xbox 370 S XT, released in 2021.

Because they already made their bed with the latest mid-life upgrades, with the same-old shitty Jaguar (both Pro and X). And we're stuck with it for the next 3 years, or buyers will be incredibly disappointed with the quickly-abandoned mid-life upgrades.
 
Rauelius said:
Bear in mind, that would be like comparing a 2.3Ghz FX-8350 + GTX 1070(XBOne-X) to a Ryzen 5 1500x + RX-570 (PS5),
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Well, with the cat cores, probably more like an A10-7850 with igpu vs ... anything better. But I get your point, I think.
 
Rauelius said:
Even if the PS5 uses the same RX-570-class GPU-side as the PS4-Pro and just has a Ryzen-based CPU-side and 12-16GB of ram, it would ROFL-Stomp the XBOne-X. Bear in mind, that would be like comparing a 2.3Ghz FX-8350 + GTX 1070(XBOne-X) to a Ryzen 5 1500x + RX-570 (PS5),
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I can't grasp what your trying to say with your intermix of CPU /GPU versions. The XBoxOneX has about the equivalent of a RX570 with some special Vega advancements bolted on.
 
Meeho said:
How does A75 compare to Jaguar and 2.x GHz 4/8 Ryzen?
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Almost impossible to compare if you aren't a rabid fan-boi.
There is a reason why programmers prefer to stay on a linear line with code. If it wasn't a deal, then specs would change by the minute. They don't.
 
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