microsoft Xbox One Silicon Talk

[trooper11]

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/08/29/a-deep-dive-into-microsofts-xbox-ones-architecture/

 

Thats a 20% speed advantage. Also add the 1 core SHAPE offloading, potentially 33% more CPU computing power right there. Considering there are over a dozen custom chips in this thing, the computing power of xbox one will be unrivaled.

 

 

Ok that follow up article is very informative.

 

So not only was MS able to bump up the clock speed of their gpu, but they also bumped up the speed of the cpu. That means the cpu on the X1 actually has an edge on the ps4 cpu.  That's pretty interesting and may point to the reason they built the case the way they did.  The better cooling system allowed them to push the base parts more it seems.

 

Further down in the article, they talk about the fact that the amd cpu does not support HSA/HUMA functions, so MS had to build its own mechanism in order to support the function.  Since it was said that the ps4 supports that as well, that would mean Sony had to also build in its own mechanism for it.  It'll be interesting to see how the ps4 hardware compares at the chip level. 

 

 

I'm interested in seeing the following articles they have on the rest of the system.

[vcfan]

So not only was MS able to bump up the clock speed of their gpu, but they also bumped up the speed of the cpu. That means the cpu on the X1 actually has an edge on the ps4 cpu.  That's pretty interesting and may point to the reason they built the case the way they did.  The better cooling system allowed them to push the base parts more it seems.

 

right,so they bumped up the cpu to 1.9Ghz, the gpu to 853Mhz, have all these custom chips, and the SoC is actually the second biggest silicon chip, right behind the GTX TITAN. if people actually think the chip and box sizes are just for fun,they have another thing coming. even the power supply is external.

[Arceles]

right,so they bumped up the cpu to 1.9Ghz, the gpu to 853Mhz, have all these custom chips, and the SoC is actually the second biggest silicon chip, right behind the GTX TITAN. if people actually think the chip and box sizes are just for fun,they have another thing coming. even the power supply is external.

Stop doing absurd comparisons in order to do false publicity to a console, be either X1 or PS4. the GTX titan alone consumes twice energy as much as the entire X1, both on full load. The overall power of the X1 and PS4 I really doubt it excels that of Radeon 7870, lower level access perhaps may go above but I really doubt they could even reach a Radeon 7950.

[vcfan]

Stop doing absurd comparisons in order to do false publicity to a console, be either X1 or PS4. the GTX titan alone consumes twice energy as much as the entire X1, both on full load. The overall power of the X1 and PS4 I really doubt it excels that of Radeon 7870, lower level access perhaps may go above but I really doubt they could even reach a Radeon 7950.

 

im not making a comparison in performance to a titan. im only comparing the size to show its a big chip, with alot of stuff going on. of course it wont be even close in performance to a titan,because the gpu is only one part of the soc. what im showing is, the SoC is not big for the hell of it,and it is in fact the second biggest silicon chip that will be produced.

[George P Global Moderator]

I suppose those rumors about "secret souce" for the CPU/GPU are holding true then?  We're talking a good chunk of custom work here from MS' hardware department.  People at first laughed when Neowin posted that article which had the AMD CEO saying they co-engineered the XB1 SoC with MS.  Or maybe it was a MS rep who said it about AMD?  People were saying that it was just AMDs APU work that MS was taking and dropping into the XB1.  That's how we started to get into comparing it's GPU performance to a stock 7770 and so on even though now that we have more details we can see it's in fact a apples to oranges comparison that doesn't hold true.

 

Sure the systems are x86 based, and from a pure software coding standpoint it makes it easier on devs but with this level of custom work inside you really are talking about something new and different at least from a chip/SoC/hardware level if not in software/coding/API.

[Showan]

There's more...

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/08/30/a-deep-dive-in-to-microsofts-xbox-one-gpu-and-on-die-memory/

This GPU is not like the others you can buy

The GPU block is where things start to get really interesting to the point where calling it only GPU is almost a misnomer. Graphics are by far the majority of the transistors here but there are at least seven other blocks in that area. The exact count is a bit nebulous though, Microsoft claims ?15 special purpose co-processors? not counting the CPUs and GPUs, eight of which are audio. That would leave seven for the rest of the system and those should end up in the GPU block. SemiAccurate knows that there are several important sub-systems in the XBO that are not on the diagrams or in the talk but we are not sure if the 15 count includes them or not. For simplicity we will use a co-processor count of 7 in the GPU block, 8 in the Audio unit.

Back to the GPU however we can see there is a lot there, the whole block is not just a GPU and media encoder, it is much more. There is obviously the Radeon GPU, something that sources say is somewhere between an HD6000 and HD7000 in capabilities and a fraction behind what Sony has in the PS4. These very minor version differences should be more than made up for by the differences in uncores and system implementation though, don?t read too much in to such minor generational differences. Think of this as more nuance than substantial.

[Showan]

The reason for minimum and peak bandwidth counts are quite simple, unlike DRAM the embedded memory doesn?t have to go through all the bank tricks and other bits necessary to get any sane efficiency numbers. It is also much lower latency so any of the write coalescing tricks and other DRAM controller tricks would be pointless and trash the hard-won latency figures. In essence it would be counter-productive to do so. The down side of this is that if the code being run isn?t very good, and by that we mean lots of small (64b) reads or writes, the controller can?t utilize the extra width for anything useful so the bandwidth is wasted. If the running code is well tuned it will do all or at least mostly 256b transfers and possibly hit that 209GBps peak number.

To translate from technical minutia to English, good code = 204GBps, bad code = 109GBps, and reality is somewhere in between. Even if you try there is almost no way to hit the bare minimum or peak numbers. Microsoft sources SemiAccurate talked to say real world code, the early stuff that is out there anyway, is in the 140-150GBps range, about what you would expect. Add some reasonable real-world DDR3 utilization numbers and the total system bandwidth numbers Microsoft threw around at the launch seems quite reasonable. This embedded DRAM is however not a cache in the traditional PC sense, not even close.S|A

[vcfan]

nice,i was waiting for part 2.

 

7 co processors in the gpu block,interesting. ive read rumors about one fixed function physics core, and two fixed function geometry cores.

[Showan]

I think Mark Rein's, Tweet from June was over looked at how power the Xbox One really is

https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkRein/status/342100479704190976?screen_name=MarkRein

[George P Global Moderator]

The more we find out about the XB1 SoC the better it sounds, unlike Sony, MS decided to go a different more tweaked/optimized route with their chip and not try to just brute force it like PC GPUs are made to do.   Overall I think this means good things for the rest of MS' platforms because there are specific DX11.2 updates that translate well to lower level, less powerful hardware/devices and once developers get a handle for coding their games on the XB1 which uses much of the same then we can expect a good boost in gfx quality on WP and Win8/RT tablets IMO.

 

At the least it should make porting things less of a headache. 

[trooper11]

One thing I take away from the second article is that the eDRAM is not cache in the pc sense.  So it sounds more like a multi purpose pool of low latency/high bandwidth storage that developers can leverage as they see fit.

 

Interesting stuff.

[MikeChipshop Member]

Very interesting.

Where have all the PS4 fan boys gone though?

[JonnyLH]

I think Mark Rein's, Tweet from June was over looked at how power the Xbox One really is

https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkRein/status/342100479704190976?screen_name=MarkRein

That really does say something, Mark Rein is a die hard pc gamer and loves everything pc. He must have quite alot of faith in it, considering they haven't shown an xb1 demo. I put my money on Gears 4 at E3 next year.

[George P Global Moderator]

That really does say something, Mark Rein is a die hard pc gamer and loves everything pc. He must have quite alot of faith in it, considering they haven't shown an xb1 demo. I put my money on Gears 4 at E3 next year.

 

Well, they did show demos behind closed doors, they showed a almost done dashboard demo at Gamescon for a select few, and they have a number of games you can play at each show.    It's still early days though and I can't wait to see how things turn out once developers have a better grasp of the tweaks MS has made to the SoC plus any use of the cloud they can take advantage of.

[Yogurtmaster]

Yeah, I have been pretty much paying attention to the information out there and this is pretty much what I was thinking too.

In many cases the Xbox One is going to be more powerful than the PS4.

 

The raw numbers do not tell the full story.  It's not some made up thing or damage control.  It's that Sony took 95 percent of an off the shelf PC hardware and integrated it into the PS4.

Microsoft on the other hand is 95 percent heavily modified non off the shelf hardware.

 

So, the PS4 is exactly like a PC as is actually probably easier of the two to emulate on a high end PC like what I have.   Because the two architectures are completely different in almost

every way, except maybe the CPU, it makes it harder to compare just raw numbers.  The Xbox One is NOT a PC architecture as far as beyond the CPU and even that has been modified as well.

 

We will see for sure when Multiplatform games come out, but a lot of people that are buying the PS4 because they think it's going to be better is going to be disappointed

and I haven't even factored in the "server processing" aspect yet that is going to be growing over the next 6 years.

 

Most people haven't been paying attention.  I had to gather this information to put in that PDF that I made.  I did a lot of research and that is why I know a lot of this.

[MikeChipshop Member]

This thread alone has swung my attention more towards the XB1. I can't wait to see both these consoles in the wild and see for real how they perform. Going to be a great generation.

I've been saying since the start that people shouldn't listen to raw figures as they mean ef all in the real world.

[vcfan]

what this really means is, even though the programmable shaders are 1.3TFLOPS of power, this isn't the only part of the gpu pipeline. the article clearly says there are more subsystems and special processors(7 on the gpu) not on any of the diagrams. these weren't on the leaked slides  either. 

[HawkMan]

Well as I have said since forever, teraflops is a meaningless measurement. and the Sony grop kept reiterating "it's a completely valid benchmark because it's identical architecture". trying to tell them othewise has been fruitless, and true to form for the group since last launch, whenever they don't have any valid arguments to counter with, or even any made up ones that doesn't sound silly even to themselves, they dissapear. 

[IceBreakerG]

Now all we need is a release date and for November to get here!  After reading both of the articles on semiaccurate, I'm definitely impressed with how the system is coming together.  The video overlay functionality seems cool too, and if I'm understanding everything correctly, the game dvr will have pretty much 0 impact on the performance of the system as well.  Nice.

[Thief000]

Very interesting.

Where have all the PS4 fan boys gone though?

 

Spreading more lies about Xbox One on N4G and NeoGAF most likely.

[Showan]

MS has made a gem here, if all that has been laid out so far comes to fruition.

No matter what your doing on the X1, and how much multitasking that is going on, it seems that nothing interferes with each other. Almost equates to 0 bottlenecks (well at least on paper, and what has been shown so far)...

Could it be, no loading bars, or circles, or load anything... On a system level at least...

[vcfan]

i was trying to find where i read about the fixed function physics and geometry processors,and i found this

 

The graphics section of the main processor has 15 special processors that can handle things like graphics or physics processing. Data highways can transfer bits at a rate of 200GBs per second or more across different parts of the chip. The audio subsystem has two dedicated vector cores.

 

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/26/microsoft-disclosed-details-for-the-main-processor-and-the-kinect-image-processor-in-the-xbox-one-video-game-console-today-at-a-chip-design-conference-those-details-are-critical-for-the-kind-of-expe/

 

 

seems the semiaccurate article is a bit wrong, the graphics portion alone has 15 special processors. the custom audio processors are not included in this figure.

[Showan]

i was trying to find where i read about the fixed function physics and geometry processors,and i found this

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/26/microsoft-disclosed-details-for-the-main-processor-and-the-kinect-image-processor-in-the-xbox-one-video-game-console-today-at-a-chip-design-conference-those-details-are-critical-for-the-kind-of-expe/

seems the semiaccurate article is a bit wrong, the graphics portion alone has 15 special processors. the custom audio processors are not included in this figure.

That's even better... November couldn't come fast enough...

[spaceelf]

That's even better... November couldn't come fast enough...

Oh but it CAN!  how else can you see all those games you want to buy between now and November but won't because you know you'll regret it?

[Showan]

Oh but it CAN!  how else can you see all those games you want to buy between now and November but won't because you know you'll regret it?

My wallet already giving me attitude..

Beyond: 2 Souls

GTA V ( I hate GTA... Until I saw the online portion) 360

Brothers (Live Arcade)

Rayman

Just purchased, Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom off Live because it so cheap right now ($15)

All those are games I still want to buy... And I still have a backlog I want to get through (Looking at you Skyrim)...

I guess, things like this are a good problem to have , with the world being so crazy an all