AMD 8-core Ryzen APU to Power Sony Playstation 5, Says the Rumor Mill

[Solid State Soul ( SSS )]

Development of new CPU and GPU costs money. Huge money.
Not only that AMD is not developing those gaming consoles chips "for free", but it is covering a big chunk of the development costs needed to keep making new CPU and GPU designs. Without consoles' sales, AMD would be closed today.

Yah, they are far behind in the desecrate graphics business. So investing more in console hardware makes sense from a return on investment.

Go to the steam hardware GPU charts, you will see nvidia dominate the first 17 positions. AMD comes in the 18th place for the number of people playing on AMD gpu

 

[SoNic67]

Current PS4 is already x86 and you still have A LOT of games that are not on PC. It all depends on other factors. If you look at the 5 GOTY nominees this year, 3 of them are not on PC, being console exclusive. Last year 4 of them were console exclusive too.

Porting the games might be easy technically, but it is not possible when exclusivity contracts and money are involved.

Go to the steam hardware GPU charts, you will see nvidia dominate the first 17 positions. AMD comes in the 18th place for the number of people playing on AMD gpu

Without AMD in competition, nVidia would be probably still at Kepler gen GPU's and we would be still paying $1000 for that.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Without consoles' sales, AMD would be closed today.

Not true. Console sales no doubt help AMD's bottomline but AMD is not dependent on that income to survive. The margins on each console sold are very, very slim.

Current PS4 is already x86 and you still have A LOT of games that are not on PC. It all depends on other factors. If you look at the 5 GOTY nominees this year, 3 of them are not on PC, being console exclusive. Last year 4 of them were console exclusive too.

Sony spends a lot of money to keep those exclusives exclusive. They're not exclusive for technical reasons. Microsoft, on the other hand, as pretty much given up on exclusives to promote UWP Xbox One/Windows 10 cross-releases.

 

[Aldain]

That have been confirmed several times!

it's on 7nm, the jaguar core was rather large when PS4 came out.
Furthermore, if they cut L3 cache it'll be a lot smaller too, when Zen2 launches we will see a common L3 cache for all 8 cores reducing the need for as large L3 cache as it'll be more effecient as cross ccx penalty will be removed. (8-10mb L3 instead of 16mb) or even less as a possibility.
You remove a IF between each CCX further reducing the die space area required.

It si not confirmed that NAVI was made in partnership with Sony..

Yah, they are far behind in the desecrate graphics business. So investing more in console hardware makes sense from a return on investment.

Go to the steam hardware GPU charts, you will see nvidia dominate the first 17 positions. AMD comes in the 18th place for the number of people playing on AMD gpu

LOL

Steam hardware survey... i stoped reading after that

It is not. Navi is an RTG microarchitecture replacing Vega across the product stack. It was designed with Sony's needs in mind.


Navi.

It was never ever CONFIRMED that it was designed for Sony needs..

 

[Vya Domus]

Draw calls.

I am just very doubtful of that. 14 clock cycles is an incredibly small number to account for all draw calls within a frame and I am sure you can sense that number seems off too. But lets say that is true, that is still just the draw calls, not the entire CPU time required for a frame to be processed.

Without having a debugger attached, you can't know that the CPU is to blame.

True but it's not required to make an educated guess that when the framerate tanks in a scene full of physics interactions it is due to the CPU.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It was never ever CONFIRMED that it was designed for Sony needs..

Sources: AMD Created Navi For Sony's PlayStation 5, Vega Suffered

According to my sources, Navi isn't just inside the Sony PS5; it was created for Sony. The vast majority of AMD and Sony's Navi collaboration took place while Raja Koduri -- Radeon Technologies Group boss and chief architect -- was at AMD.

But the collaboration came at the expense of Radeon RX Vega and other in-development projects. Allegedly, Koduri saw up to a massive 2/3 of his engineering team devoted exclusively to Navi against his wishes, which resulted in a final RX Vega product Koduri was displeased with as resources and engineering hours were much lower than anticipated

Vega had a remarkably tough launch because HBCC wasn't ready for primetime.

 

[Keullo-e]

PS3 was a nightmare for developers

I know from what I've read

Gran Turismo 6 looked just so damn great.

 

[VSG]

This makes absolutely no sense. If they console is supposed to start selling TWO YEARS from now, why the hell would it contain a CPU that's a year old NOW?

Did you read on? Console developer kits have to be ready already to get launch titles ready to go, which means the hardware to be used will be one that is already finalized. This is why we see outdated hardware in consoles at launch compared to the respective PC platform, which is also aided by a more mature process meaning higher yield and a lower manufacturing cost.

 

[Rahnak]

Did you read on? Console developer kits have to be ready already to get launch titles ready to go, which means the hardware to be used will be one that is already finalized. This is why we see outdated hardware in consoles at launch compared to the respective PC platform, which is also aided by a more mature process meaning higher yield and a lower manufacturing cost.

I don't see why they couldn't ship the dev kits with some Ryzen 1 variant and then for release use the more optimized ryzen gen 2 or ryzen 2. For a better analogy, imagine the PS4 was the dev kit and PS4 Pro was the released product.

 

[Joss]

Vega had a remarkably tough launch because HBCC wasn't ready for primetime

True.
But why Nvidia's RTX don't have a "remarkably tough launch" when they too bring a technology that is not, definitely not, ready for prime time? because the tech press is too lenient? The consumer buys imbecility?

 

[Kamgusta]

A 8 cores / 16 threads 7nm Ryzen 2 (no matter the GHzs it will have) would be a MASSIVE improvement in the console world.
Plenty of power for anything, from physix, to AI, to concurrent streaming and even old hardware emulation.

 

[Manu_PT]

A 8 cores / 16 threads 7nm Ryzen 2 (no matter the GHzs it will have) would be a MASSIVE improvement in the console world.
Plenty of power for anything, from physix, to AI, to concurrent streaming and even old hardware emulation.

Rumours/leaks talk about Ryzen 8 core 2,4/2.6ghz + GTX1080ti performance, for 500€/$. That would be awesome and a big win as PC market is getting worse and worse. 500€ right now on the PC world is enough for 16gb 3200mhz RAM and a safe (aka good VRM) motherboard. Still missing CPU, GPU, PSU, HDD, Case, cooler, etc....

Wonder why PS4 is at 100 million units mark right now

 

[IceShroom]

Jaguar is the equivalent of Intel's Atom. It's missing a lot of high level instruction sets that their Core/Ryzen brethren support. They also feature no multithreading circuitry so there's strictly one thread executed per core. Puma (updated version of Jaguar) makes a lot of sense to be used in the new consoles. AMD has not announced a new ultra-lower power microarchitecture since Puma.

AMD's Jaguar architecture is much more powerful then Intel's Atom architecture. Jaguar supports AVX like Core/Zen(Ryzen is a processor brand, not architecture name).
Here is proper link:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6976...powering-xbox-one-playstation-4-kabini-temash

 

[SoNic67]

Is AVX that important in games?

 

[Vya Domus]

Is AVX that important in games?

Not really.

 

[M2B]

Rumours/leaks talk about Ryzen 8 core 2,4/2.6ghz + GTX1080ti performance, for 500€/$. That would be awesome and a big win as PC market is getting worse and worse. 500€ right now on the PC world is enough for 16gb 3200mhz RAM and a safe (aka good VRM) motherboard. Still missing CPU, GPU, PSU, HDD, Case, cooler, etc....

Wonder why PS4 is at 100 million units mark right now

500$ is enough for a seriously capable CPU (Ryzen 5 2600) , 16GB of RAM @3GHz , a top-end b450 board and a capable 650W PSU. stop kidding yourself.

"GTX 1080 Ti performance"
Vega 56 performance is the most you can expect but hey, keep dreaming.

 

[E-curbi]

Was there ever any doubt? Navi was literally being engineered for PlayStation 5 for years.

On the CPU side, I'm not convinced that it's going to be Ryzen-based. Jaguar consumes less die space and does the job well enough. If it is Ryzen-based, it's likely a lean version of the cores (Jaguar-esque).

WoooooHooooo - GO AMD!

 

[Fizzle bomber]

CPU-wise it might be good enough for a solid 60FPS but It's pure ignorance to even think a Vega 56 level GPU would be enough to push 4K/60 in next gen titles.
Most console players who think 4k/60 will be the new standard for console games will be disappointed.

I think this makes sense given Vega 56 is a very capable GPU if the games are optimized for it as we have seen in some PC gaming benchmarks. Plus it would make a lot of sense given they have to keep the prices down which is where console value lies. They could come up with an beast setup, but that wouldn't justify the consumer base consoles stand for.

 

[Xaled]

Development of new CPU and GPU costs money. Huge money.
Not only that AMD is not developing those gaming consoles chips "for free", but it is covering a big chunk of the development costs needed to keep making new CPU and GPU designs. Without consoles' sales, AMD would be closed today. So I would say that yes, they harvest enough.

So thats why AMD got behind nVidia 5-6 years in gpus?

 

[VSG]

I don't see why they couldn't ship the dev kits with some Ryzen 1 variant and then for release use the more optimized ryzen gen 2 or ryzen 2. For a better analogy, imagine the PS4 was the dev kit and PS4 Pro was the released product.

That opens up a dangerous precedent to game development for consoles. I know from having spoken to many at E3 last year that they were not happy about having to support two same-gen consoles for Sony and Microsoft each, and then the PSVR on top of that. Each new CPU generation brings up new instruction sets as part of the task optimization process, so it is not trivial necessarily to ship out a different hardware kit to devs. Also, most devs are overworked to death these days so I can completely understand them not even wanting to put the effort to try out something else.

DX12/Mantle etc were all supposed to help with this, as with the vast multitude of PC configurations, but we all know how that is going/went.

 

[newtekie1]

Sources: AMD Created Navi For Sony's PlayStation 5, Vega Suffered


Vega had a remarkably tough launch because HBCC wasn't ready for primetime.

An article siting "anonymous sources that refuse to be named" is not confirmation of anything.

 

[efikkan]

Each new CPU generation brings up new instruction sets as part of the task optimization process, so it is not trivial necessarily to ship out a different hardware kit to devs.

Games are rarely, if at all, optimized on ISA level. Zen 2 is not going to change fundamentally over Zen 1, and if there are changes these will be minor additions, probably not even relevant for gaming.

Optimizing console games is about calibrating shaders and assets, not CPU assembly code.

DX12/Mantle etc were all supposed to help with this, as with the vast multitude of PC configurations, but we all know how that is going/went.

Really?
If anything, Direct3D and Mantle increases the effort for the developer. But this comes down to API calls to the GPU, not assembly code in the CPU.

 

[Rahnak]

That opens up a dangerous precedent to game development for consoles. I know from having spoken to many at E3 last year that they were not happy about having to support two same-gen consoles for Sony and Microsoft each, and then the PSVR on top of that. Each new CPU generation brings up new instruction sets as part of the task optimization process, so it is not trivial necessarily to ship out a different hardware kit to devs. Also, most devs are overworked to death these days so I can completely understand them not even wanting to put the effort to try out something else.

DX12/Mantle etc were all supposed to help with this, as with the vast multitude of PC configurations, but we all know how that is going/went.

I thought the changes would be minimal.. That's unfortunate but understandable. In any way, moving to a Zen based cpu would be miles better than the current offerings. I'm more concerned with the GPU side of things. From what I gathered, the PS2 has 6.2 GFLOPS, the PS3 192GFLOPS and the PS4 has 1.8TFLOPS or 4.2TFLOPS in the Pro version. The XboneX is at 6TFLOPS. I don't see a that big of a bump in performance for the next generation.

 

[SoNic67]

GPU at 6 TFlops SinglePrecision is in the class of RX580.
RX590 inches in at 7 TFlops SP. Vega56 is at 8-10 TFlops SP but it can do also 20 TFlops in HalfPrecision - that might became important in games if the console's GPU will support it. Vega 64 is at 10-12 TFlops SP with 20-25 TFlops in HP.

 

[Fleurious]

More CPU power is always welcome.