Stereophile
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2003
- Messages
- 5,116
Its the poverty PC.
Apples and oranges.
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Its the poverty PC.
Sounds like that may be accurate. If the rumors that it is an APU, as in integrated CPU and GPU on one die then that is correct. Having only one chip makes things cost less. Each chip raises the hardware price. However it also means that the overall performance can't be as high. You could not pack, say, a GTX 680 and a i7-2600 on one die. It would be too large, too hot, too prone to failure.
Hence AMD APUs are the cheap option. They cost less, and deliver less performance. That's all fine and well, but if people are taking what they said to mean "We delivered a performance level nVidia couldn't do," that is almost certainly false. We can see that in GPUs, nVidia has no problems performance wise.
My guess is it was the APU thing, combined with a willingness to take extremely low margins, that got AMD the contract. The APU made it cheaper and AMD probably took a very low margin deal, since they need the contract, and that was a price nVidia couldn't touch.
lol still trying to spin it?
NVidia does not have an x86 license, so it was impossible for them to compete from the get go...
You don't seem very informed, the other consoles are AMD too...
The first consideration before anything else is price. If you look at the absolutely crap deal AMD got for the Xbox 360 (we can assume it's probably similar), it's unsurprising that other console makers would want that, and other GPU makers wouldn't want to "compete" with it...it's hard to razor a razor...
Bitter much son? You seem to have an odd definition of "spin" as being "Anything I don't agree with."
Seriously I have no dog in this race. I'm not getting a console. I just think that some console fans are setting themselves up for disappointment. They seem to think that there's some amazing tech AMD has that will make the consoles better than anything else. In reality, sounds like they are going to be mid range since there are limits to the amount you can knock on to a single chip and that is the route they are going.
Me, I'm going to stick with computers, since I like having a high end computer anyhow, and I'll buy whatever GPU works the best for me since I'm not a rabid fanboy. At present that's a 680 in the desktop and 7970M in the laptop.
Sterophile is to Sony what theNoid is to Microsoft. You won't get a productive argument from either of them.
Oh BS. My arguments are always valid, even if I strongly prefer Sony to MS.
Spin what? It is what it is. What AMD could and did offer was a lower cost solution. Nothing wrong with that. However there seems to be this idea (which AMD likes, of course) that they are offering some level of performance/tech that nVidia couldn't. No, they offered an integrated solution which costs less. That's great, but it does mean less performance.
they offered an integrated solution which costs less. That's great, but it does mean less performance.
In PS4, the GPU and CPU can both access each other's pipelines and effectively share all kinds of work. Its been designed for this and again, there is a ton of bandwidth on tap. The chips has also been designed to really take advantage of multi-threading off its 8 cores. It won't have quite the same possibilities as Cell's SPU's (especially with certain types of work), but they took a lot of inspiration from the workflow for the SPUs, to increase threading efficiency.
You're missing the point. You keep bringing up lower cost. Lower cost compared to what ? A top of the line PC GPU ? That was never in the cards. Nobody else could offer the same level of tech as this AMD APU. Look up HSA. They are even ahead of Intel in that regard. GPU computing is going to be an important feature next gen. And note I said technology not performance. Too many people around here have a one track mind and can't understand bigger concepts.
NVidia does not have an x86 license, so it was impossible for them to compete from the get go...
NVIDIA would have crafted then an ARM + GPU solution which would have worked just as well - if not better. What NVIDIA is saying is that they don't think the deal is really profitable for them with the terms Sony would be giving them.
Given enough cash and stubbornness, Sony could've had high-end Intel CPU and nVidia GPU, providing arguably better performance at similar power draw. Would it have been a good decision? Not really.
Fanboi alert. First 64-bit ARM products are months away and they are no match for the current x86 offerings, whatever clockspeeds. No point in cramming 128 ARM cores. either. Big numbers are useless for gaming.
And who cares? When it comes out it will still be years behind PC Hardware. Consoles = lose
As you point out the Cell had all kinds of theoretical advantages. It had 7SPU vs. 3 IN ORDER cores (in order really kinda stinks) that were in the xbox 360. But when it came to Skyrim it could barely run the game whereas the XBOX360 had no problem. Theory doesn't always work out..
Sony's choice at the beginning of PS4 development, was to go x86. They felt instruction set IS relevant. With the emphasis on X86 and the difficulty of fitting custom code time into a tight development schedule, Sony opted to start with developer preference and then figure out novel ways to tweak it to get the most out of it.I think people misunderstand with ARM and Intel and all that. Sony's other choice wasn't nVidia doing everything, it was nVidia doing the graphics chip and someone else, probably IBM, doing the CPU. Instruction set is all kinds of not relevant for consoles, since you have to do a specific design for it anyhow.
Awesome post thank you!! I love the xbox-u... lolYou couldn't put discrete GTX 680 and i7 chips in there either. Waaaay too expensive, hot, and power demanding for a mass market priced console. The Crytek CEO of all people said the next gen PS4 has as much graphics hp as can realistically go into a console.
If Sony went with Nvidia GPU, it would have been close in performance to what AMD provided and they would still need to find a CPU. Nvidia calling Sony cheap is just a loaded word and not reflective of reality. I mean if an 18cu 1.8TF GPU is going cheap, what would they call Durango's puny 1.2TF effort ? An Xbox-U ?
Anyone remember how the Nvidia GPU in the PS3 couldn't scale to 1080p while the AMD GPU could?
Fanboi alert. First 64-bit ARM products are months away and they are no match for the current x86 offerings, whatever clockspeeds. No point in cramming 128 ARM cores. either. Big numbers are useless for gaming.
I have always been told the exact opposite. Why do you think so many games today still don't use more than 2-3 cores max, a few notable exceptions (BF3) aside? If it was so easy to write multithreaded game engines that would leverage more cores, why aren't we seeing it?A game engine can easily be adapted from a big thread working on many variables to eight smaller threads updating the same number of variables
Has anyone thought that by going x86 based, Sony is trying to unify code compiling and structuring for their games?
Remember when everyone was bitching that "oh that game is just a console port". Well, maybe by going x86 and not some proprietary architecture, that "console ports" (at least PS4 ports) may not be as bad as people think. Same relatively arch, means that crossover games will probably be easier/more efficient/ more similar across PS4 and PC.
Just a thought...
Has anyone thought that by going x86 based, Sony is trying to unify code compiling and structuring for their games?
Remember when everyone was bitching that "oh that game is just a console port". Well, maybe by going x86 and not some proprietary architecture, that "console ports" (at least PS4 ports) may not be as bad as people think. Same relatively arch, means that crossover games will probably be easier/more efficient/ more similar across PS4 and PC.
Just a thought...
I have always been told the exact opposite. Why do you think so many games today still don't use more than 2-3 cores max, a few notable exceptions (BF3) aside? If it was so easy to write multithreaded game engines that would leverage more cores, why aren't we seeing it?
It's just not that simple.