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Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

reuters.com

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Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#191

Post by qwytw »

coder543 wrote: post #190
qwytw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying that Nvidia couldn't make more powerful hardware for a high end console? Hard to say. It tooks Qualcomm years make something that was superior to standard ARM designs. GPU is of course another matter. > I'm certain Nvidia would have no trouble doing a high end console, The last mobile/consumer CPU (based on their own core) that they have released came out in 2015 and they have been using off the shel…

> I think it depends more on what Nintendo is willing to pay, I doubt they really want a "high-end" chip. In this thread, we were talking about what Sony and Microsoft would want for successors to the PS5 and XSX, not Nintendo. Nintendo was just a convenient demonstration that Nvidia is clearly willing to partner with console makers like Sony and Microsoft. > Hard to say. It tooks Qualcomm years make something that w…

> Nvidia is using very powerful ARM cores in their Grace CPU today

I'm not sure Neoverse is particularly (or at all) suitable for gaming consoles. Having 60+ cores wouldn't be particularly useful and their single core performance is pretty horrible (by design).

> which are very likely good enough for modern consoles

Are they? Cortex-X4 has barely caught up with Apple's M1 (from 2020)? What other options are there? ARM just doesen't seem to care that much about the laptop/desktop market at all.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#192

Post by coder543 »

qwytw wrote: post #191
coder543 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it depends more on what Nintendo is willing to pay, I doubt they really want a "high-end" chip. In this thread, we were talking about what Sony and Microsoft would want for successors to the PS5 and XSX, not Nintendo. Nintendo was just a convenient demonstration that Nvidia is clearly willing to partner with console makers like Sony and Microsoft. > Hard to say. It tooks Qualcomm years make something that w…

> Nvidia is using very powerful ARM cores in their Grace CPU today I'm not sure Neoverse is particularly (or at all) suitable for gaming consoles. Having 60+ cores wouldn't be particularly useful and their single core performance is pretty horrible (by design). > which are very likely good enough for modern consoles Are they? Cortex-X4 has barely caught up with Apple's M1 (from 2020)? What other options are there? AR…

The Neoverse cores are substantially more powerful than something like Cortex-X4. Why would they not be suitable? It's hard to find benchmarks that are apples-to-apples in tests that would be relevant for gaming, but what little I've been able to find shows that the Neoverse V2 cores in Nvidia's Grace CPU are competitive against AMD's CPUs. I hate to draw specific comparisons, because it's very easy to attack when, as I already said, the numbers are hard to come by, but I'm seeing probably 20% better than Zen 3 on a clock-for-clock, single core basis. The current-generation PS5 and XSX are based on Zen 2. Zen 3 was already a 10% to 30% jump in IPC over Zen 2, depending on who you ask. Any hypothetical Nvidia-led SoC design for a next-gen console would be pulling in cores like the Neoverse V3 cores that have been announced, and are supposedly another 15% to 20% better than Neoverse V2, or even Neoverse V4 cores which might be available in time for the next-gen consoles.

These gains add up to be substantial over the current-gen consoles, and as an armchair console designer, I don't see how you can be so confident they wouldn't be good enough.

The CPU cores Nvidia has access to seem more than sufficient, and the GPU would be exceptional. AMD is clearly not the only one capable of providing hardware for consoles. Nvidia has done it, will do it again, and the evidence suggests Nvidia could certainly scale up to much bigger consoles if needed. One problem is certainly that Nvidia is making bank off of AI at the moment, and doesn't need to vie for the attention of console makers right now, so they aren't offering any good deals to those OEMs. The other problem is that console makers also don't want any break in compatibility. I've already addressed these problems in previous comments. It's just incorrect to say that the console makers have no other choices. They're just happy with what AMD is offering, and making the choice to stick with that. Nintendo will be happy using hardware made on a previous process node, so it won't interfere with Nvidia's plan to make insane money off of AI chips the way that next-gen console expectations from Sony or Microsoft would. I'm happy to admit that I'm being speculative in the reasons behind these things, but there seem to be enough facts to support the basic assertion that AMD is not the only option, which is what this sub-thread is about.

Since you seem so confident in your assertions, I assume you have good sources to back up the claim that Neoverse V2/V3/V4 wouldn't be suitable for gaming consoles?

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#193

Post by pjmlp »

lynguist wrote: post #181
derstander wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia got the bid for Switch when they were basically dumping those unwanted Tegra to Nintendo for an incredibly low price. This seems pretty well aligned with Gunpei Yokoi’s strategy of “Lateral Thinking [with] Withered Technology”. It worked out pretty well for Nintendo in the past (e.g., Gameboy) and seems to be working out with the Switch. Even though he has passed, his Wikipedia page alleges that this philoso…

> Withered technology At the time of its release the Nintendo Switch’s CPU was only a single generation behind the latest offering by ARM; and its GPU was by far the most powerful mobile GPU available. It doesn’t hold true for Switch. What happened is that mobile compute has advanced tremendously since 2017 and Switch is stuck on technology that was leading in early 2017.

While providing marvelous gaming experiences, faster polygons doesn't equate better games, and is specially an issue in latest gen PlayStation and XBox where many games with great graphics have lousy gameplay experience at high prices.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#194

Post by pjmlp »

MBCook wrote: post #107
bigfishrunning wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first year of PS4 was pretty dry because of the lack of BC; It really helped that the competition was the Xbox One, which was less appealing for a lot of reasons

At this point people have loved the PS5 and Xbox Series for having full backwards compatibility. The Xbox goes even further through software. People liked the Wii’s backwards compatibility and the Wii U (for those who had it). And Nintendo’s long chain of BC from the GB to the 3DS (though eventually dropping GB/GBC) was legendary. The Switch was such a leap over the 3DS and WiiU Nintendo got away with it. It’s had su…

Which is also the reason why many games on PS 5 and XBox Series are kind of lame, as studios want to keep PS 4 and XBone gamers in the sales loop, and why PS 5 Pro is more of scam kind of thing for hardcore fans that will buy anything that a console vendor puts out.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#195

Post by pjmlp »

coder543 wrote: post #187
qwytw wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being so dismissive of the Switch shows the disconnect between what most gamers care about, and what some tech enthusiasts think gamers care about. What makes you think I am? Hardware wise it's an equivalent of a unremarkable ancient Android tablet, yet it's pretty exceptional what Nintendo manage to achieve despite of that. > The Switch 1 can do 90% of what a Steam Deck can That's highly debatable and almost compl…

> IMHO PC gaming and Nintendo have relatively little overlap (e.g. compared to PS and Xbox at least). That was true back in the Wii era, because there was nothing remarkable about the Wii apart from its input method. It was "just another home console" to most developers, so why bother going through the effort to port their games from more powerful consoles down to the Wii, where they will just look bad, run poorly, a…

Actually there is one remarkle thing about the Wii, but it hardly matters in this context, it was one of the very few consoles out there that actually had something that relates to OpenGL, namely the shading language and how the API was designed.

Many keep thinking that Khronos APIs have any use on game consoles, which is seldom the case.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#196

Post by deaddodo »

soganess wrote: post #127
deaddodo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Different x86 micro-architectures benefit from writing the machine code in slightly different ways. Games are highly optimized to the specific micro-architecture of the console, so keeping that stable helps game developers optimize for the console. While that can be true, very few gamedev companies these days optimize to that degree. They almost all use off-the-shelf middleware and game engines that are built to su…

Asking this as an open ended (if leading) question: I assume enough people are doing it otherwise PS5 Pro makes no sense... Right? They (AMD/Sony) shoehorned the RDNA 3/3.5 GPU architecture onto an older Zen 2 core, with a different process node, because... they felt like making a frankenAPU? Especially since the APUs are usually monolithic (vs chiplet) in design and share a memory controller. Surely it would have be…

> They (AMD/Sony) shoehorned the RDNA 3/3.5 GPU architecture onto an older Zen 2 core

The original core was already a custom configuration. I don't see why it seems odd that the new version would be a custom configuration based on the previous one.

> with a different process node

This doesn't apply to the PS5 SoC, but is general to AMD's methodology.

AMD has been using an off-chip interposer setup for multiple generations now. They did this specifically to allow for different process nodes for different chips.

It's cheaper (and there are more fab options) to produce chips at a lower process node. If there's no reason to update the CPU, it would make sense to keep it on the cheaper option.

In regards to the PS5 and Xbox SoCs, specifically.

The entirety of the SoC is fabbed at the same process node. A core designed for a 14nm process node and then fabbed at 7nm (assuming drastic changes weren't needed to make it function at the lower node) is going to be much smaller and run cooler on that node size. This is cheaper and leaves more space in the total footprint for the GPU-specific and auxiliary logic cores. Same rule applies above, why use more if it's not needed.

> they felt like making a frankenAPU

All of the game console chips are "frankenAPUs".

> Especially since the APUs are usually monolithic (vs chiplet) in design and share a memory controller.

"Monolithic" vs "chiplet" is an arbitrary distinction, in this case. The individual logic cores are still independent and joined together with interposers and glue logic. This is clear from the die shots:

https://videocardz.com/newz/sony-playstation-5-soc-die-pictu...

To return to the previous point, look at the space dedicated to the CCXs. The Zen2 has ~1.9bln transistors, the Zen3 ~4.1bln, the Zen4 ~6.6bln, etc. To use a newer core would double or triple that space. Increasing the total die size, making it more expensive per chip and increasing the defect rate.

> Surely it would have been easier/cheaper to put in 8 zen 4c/5c cores and call it a day.

Definitely not.

> I'm pretty sure I'm just missing something obvious...

Nothing about chip design is obvious.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#197

Post by qwytw »

coder543 wrote: post #192
qwytw wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nvidia is using very powerful ARM cores in their Grace CPU today I'm not sure Neoverse is particularly (or at all) suitable for gaming consoles. Having 60+ cores wouldn't be particularly useful and their single core performance is pretty horrible (by design). > which are very likely good enough for modern consoles Are they? Cortex-X4 has barely caught up with Apple's M1 (from 2020)? What other options are there? AR…

The Neoverse cores are substantially more powerful than something like Cortex-X4. Why would they not be suitable? It's hard to find benchmarks that are apples-to-apples in tests that would be relevant for gaming, but what little I've been able to find shows that the Neoverse V2 cores in Nvidia's Grace CPU are competitive against AMD's CPUs. I hate to draw specific comparisons, because it's very easy to attack when, a…

> Nvidia's Grace CPU are competitive against AMD's CPUs

I don't think PS/Xbox are using AMDs 64+ core server chips like Milan etc.

> I assume you have good sources to back up the claim that Neoverse V2/V3/V4

These are data center CPUs designed for very different purposes. Neoverse is only used in chips that target very specific, highly parallelized workloads. The point is having a very high number 64-128+ of relatively very slow but power efficient cores and extremely high bandwidth.

e.g Grace has comparable single thread performance to Ryzen 7 3700X (a 5 year old chip). Sure MT performance is 10x better but how does that matter for gaming workloads?

I assume you could boost the frequency and build a SoC with several times less core than all recent Neoverse chips (if ARM let's you). Nobody has done that or publically considered doing it. I can't prove that it's impossible but can you provide any specific arguments why do you think that you be a practical approach?

> substantially more powerful than something like Cortex-X4.

Of course it's just rumors but Nvidia seems to be going with ARM A78C which is a tier below X4. Which is not particularly surprising since Nintendo would rather spend money on other components / target a lower price point. As we've agreed the GPU is the important part here the CPU will probably be comparable to an off the shelf SoC you can get from Qualcomm or even MediaTek.

That might change in the future but I don't see any evidence that Nvidia is somehow particularly good at building CPUs or is close to being in the same tier as AMD, Intel, Qualcomm (maybe even Ampere depending if they finally deliver what they have been promising in the near future).

Same applies to Grace, the whole selling point is integration with their datacenter GPUs. For CPU workloads it provides pretty atrocious price/performance and it would make little sense to buy it for that.

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