Normally yes, but the difference is way to big. From 56 CUs to 20 active makes no sense in the same die. Smaller physical memory interface, too.
If it would be just half the SX die sure, but it does not seem that way.
60% yields is really bad, it would have to be that bad for your scenario to work. In reality yields will be way better, its why they disable 4cus , so if you have chips with 1 or 2 dud cus it will still work fine. If doing your strategy they would of made a 52cu chip to save more costs.
Ah true but I do think they may be coming from the same die and the specs are off.
Granted (I was using your example). However, I believe the specs between the consoles are closer than what the rumors say. Close enough to work within my scenario anyway. This is based on some of the old rumors back when there was supposedly only one Xbox in development and it was âslightly weakerâ than the PS5
On the CPU slide, on the left hand side it talks about HDMI 2.1. Straight after, it says 10Gpbs FRL. Does anyone know what that means?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12aNq14gVvUzx9HHbzgegARlPhVIT2GpJ/view
On the second slide
FRL stands for Fixed Rate Link and itâs a signaling technology supported in the HDMI 2.1 Specification. FRL is necessary to achieve the higher uncompressed resolutions such as those above 4k60 as well as the ultra high speed bandwidths up to 48Gbps. Itâs also required for compressed video transport which in turn enables operation at lower data rates for example 4k60 and ultra-high pixel rate video such as 10Kp120.
2 Likes
Thanks for the explanation dude
Which old rumors? Rumors as you know like 13,3tf ps5 rumors?
MS always had 12tf in mind since the start. On purpose, at the start they just didnât say to devs RDNA2âŚ
Wait till you see DA tech Face Off. Will be fun.
We are just waiting on Sony giving us PS5 base clock and deep dive tear down.
2 Likes
I see a lot of chatter and negative headlines about a comment by architect Mark Grossman basically saying developers arenât enthusiastic about RT right now and its impact on performance. People are spinning this to say MS is not enthusiastic about RT when designing the SX.
I recall back in March however, Xbox system architect Andrew Goossen saying something along the lines of Series X has effectively 13TF of RT performance on top of the already 12TF. The implication I got from this is RT in SX is almost free from a big performance hit is it not?
4 Likes
RT certainly is not free on the Series X. Its just a new technology especially for AMD cards. But it works fine on Series X, Microsoft even demonstrated full on pathtracing with Minecraft on Series X. Andrew Gossen just means there will be different use cases for Ray Tracing in different games. Some will use it for reflections, some will use it for global illumination. Some will not use it at all and continue to do things the âold wayâ.
âarenât enthusiasticâ is a misquote from clickbaity news outlets. He said
Weâve added hardware embedded in the compute units to perform intersections of rays with acceleration structures that represent the scene geometry hierarchy. Thatâs a sizeable fraction of the specialised ray tracing workload, the rest can be performed with good quality and good real-time performance with the baseline shader and memory design. We do support DirectX Raytracing acceleration, for the ultimate in realism, but in this generation developers still want to use traditional rendering techniques, developed over decades, without a performance penalty. They can apply ray tracing selectively, where materials and environments demand, so we wanted a good balance of die resources dedicated to the two techniques
3 Likes
Before MS announced the 12TF nobody was thinking the consoles would hit that number. The rumors were supposedly based on âspec sheets from developersâ and the PS5 was slightly more powerful. Then we got the chip testing leaks that put PS5 at 9TF or something, so Xbox was speculated at 8TF. If I am not mistaken the Series S having 4TF came out around this time and was basically just speculation it would be half of the premium Xbox.
Next MS announced they were at 12TF so everyone just bumped the PS5 to 13TF since it was supposed to be more powerful and completely ignored the Series S in the equation. So here is my thought. What if the PS5 being more powerful was based on comparisons to Series S? With the PS5 getting a power bump when they found out about the X?
2 Likes
So what do you make of this?
"Without hardware acceleration, this work could have been done in the shaders but would have consumed over 13 TFLOPs alone. For the Xbox Series X, this work is offloaded onto dedicated hardware and the shader can continue to run in parallel with full performance. In other words, Series X can effectively tap the equivalent of well over 25 TFLOPs of performance while ray tracing.
Xbox Series X goes even further than the PC standard in offering more power and flexibility to developers. In grand console tradition, we also support direct to the metal programming including support for offline BVH construction and optimisation. With these building blocks, we expect ray tracing to be an area of incredible visuals and great innovation by developers over the course of the consoleâs lifetime."
2 Likes
Yeah, this is AMDs variant of NVidias RTX technology. They are late and we donât exactly know how good it really is (spoiler: its not as good as team green). But it seems at least useful and workable (see Minecraft) and doesnât occupy a lot of die space. So I would say they found a good compromise and am very happy they have support in both next gen consoles for it.
Up till now only NVidia had support for hardware accelerated Ray Tracing. Now AMD joins the party and Intel will have support in 2021 if you believe them. So we will see a lot more implementations and innovations for Ray Tracing in different parts of games in the coming years. It is the future.
You should be enthusiastic about it 
I think those rumors were based on MS being cagey with details on specs wrt what they told third party devs. Those devs were very much out of the loop wrt Lockhart, after all. I think Phil said their goal internally from the get go was 12 TF. Not sure I ever saw any credible sources saying PS5 was right on par or more powerful. Just klee at ResetEra but he was clearly not getting credible spec info as it turned out.
2 Likes
You clearly forgot the likes of Jason Schreier and Andrew Reiner who doubled down on it the PS5 not only more powerful but ahead in design and all. A certain fraction of the internet would have called them as credible before that âaccidentâ.
7 Likes
Didnât this whole carnival of stupidity start around last years e3 with tweets from Andrew Reiner and Co?
2 Likes
It could happen but what makes me skeptical is the unpredictability of it, say they need 10million Lockhart and 4million seriesXâs , they cant control ratios doing your method, so they could end up with to many series X chips.
I think this works largely the same on current Nvidia gpus. Dxr does seem to add some more flexibility though.
But while the shader cores are free to use when the rt cores are working they share the same bandwidth pool, so performance is definitely going to be impacted.
Yes Klee was part of it. What if the specs MS was giving out were for Lockhart? We do know they wanted to keep the Series X secret and all of those âleaksâ were coming out while everyone was thinking there was only one Xbox. PS5 was more supposedly powerful, so when the 2nd Xbox rumors kicked in people just went to 4TF instead of thinking the 2nd box was a more powerful one. When the 12TF was revealed, people just boosted the PS5 to 13TF, they didnât even think maybe the it was the PS5 and Lockhart that were close. So my guess is Lockhart is(was) close to PS5s specs, well prior to Sony (maybe) boosting up the PS5 to compete with Series X.
Another part of the reason I am thinking this way is because 1. MSâs plan sounded like they wanted a regular next gen console (close to the competition) and then a premium console just like how it is now. 2. It would explain some of the confusion on how they wanted to price the consoles. Lockhart being close in spec to the PS5 and close in price with the Series X being more expensive. I think if this was the plan it also fits into why prices havenât been revealed.
So Lockhart = ~8TF and $499 with an adjustment in TF and/or price depending on how they react(ed) to the PS5
What if you factor in Xcloud/Azure âSeries Xâ server blades? Do we even know how many of those they need? I just think MS is basically maxing out whatever AMD can offer on SeriesX and will use the âleftoversâ for the Series S.
They were giving devs the currently known Lockhart specs (4 TF, etc). I personally always wondered if there might have been confusion stemming from the transition from GCNâ>RDNA2. Just my speculation, but maybe MS was using RDNA2 TF figures and Sony was using GCN equivalents? It would maybe make sense if Sony had dev kits out sooner, which is what Iâm pretty sure if the case.
I recall Klee suggesting that MS was telling everyone 12 TF for a while, but he appeared to think PS5 was above that. Beyond Klee, as @CallMeCraig noted Andrew Reiner said a dev told him something similar wrt which console was on top. Might have all just been a misunderstanding of what was meant by a TF equivalent.
Even if you factor in azure, its still unpredictable. Lockhart will likely sell more, so âleft oversâ would not make any decent business man confident.