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[EuroGamer] Sony unlocks more CPU power for PS4 game developers

7K views 121 replies 43 participants last post by  Tempest2000 
#1 ·
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-sony-unlocks-more-cpu-power-for-ps4-game-developers
Quote:
The information surfaced on Friday night on the Beyond3D forum where the latest changelog notes for the FMOD audio middleware noted the following: PS4 - Added FMOD_THREAD_CORE6 to allow access to the newly unlocked 7th core. Just one source then, but a compelling one. Over the weekend we consulted our contacts and can confirm that Core 6 has indeed been unlocked and is available for game developers to utilise.
I did not see this posted. Even if developers can't use all of the 7th core, any extra power would be nice to have especially on the cpu side of things.
 
#2 ·
Wait wait wait wait.... so The PS4 and the XB1 are only able to use 6 of the 8 cores the damned thing is BUILT WITH!?

Who's the idiot that thought this was a good idea!?
rolleyes.gif
 
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#3 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Imglidinhere View Post

Wait wait wait wait.... so The PS4 and the XB1 are only able to use 6 of the 8 cores the damned thing is BUILT WITH!?

Who's the idiot that thought this was a good idea!?
rolleyes.gif
Yeah wait what?!?! And here I was thinking games would actually start to utilize 8 threads...
 
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#4 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Imglidinhere View Post

Wait wait wait wait.... so The PS4 and the XB1 are only able to use 6 of the 8 cores the damned thing is BUILT WITH!?

Who's the idiot that thought this was a good idea!?
rolleyes.gif
If I am not mistaken the other 2 cores, now 1 core is dedicated to OS tasks, if we look back at ps3 the reason they could not do Party Chat was because it did not have enough ram set aside. With these newer systems they wanted to make sure that these features would always be able to be used.
 
#5 ·
#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Boomer1990 View Post

If I am not mistaken the other 2 cores, now 1 core is dedicated to OS tasks, if we look back at ps3 the reason they could not do Party Chat was because it did not have enough ram set aside. With these newer systems they wanted to make sure that these features would always be able to be used.
Well if you understand how the android system environment works you don't need to restrict core access to guarantee performance to the OS. They limited the number of cores because Multi-threaded applications are very weak in comprehension. It's hilarious but developers and designers pretty much run into the world of programming blindfolded when developing. To be safe and better understand their own hardware limiting access is necessary before dedicating those resources. Eventually all eight cores will be accessible.

Considering the GPU has it's own dedicated bandwidth access it'll hardly improve the frame-rate. What this will do is give developers more flexibility.

People who were comparing the PS4 cpu to the BD chips have it flawed too, there are 1 FPU per Logical Units.
 
#7 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by NuclearPeace View Post

Going off of Amdahl's law, unless PS4 games are ridiculously parallelized now you are hardly going to see a benefit from being able to use 7 cores.
Going off of Allegorithmic's benchmark and those who remarked on ps4 in light of that, the seventh core is going to make ps4 almost as fast as i7 2700K, well 94% of it.
[Source]
 
#8 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mtcn77 View Post

Going off of Allegorithmic's benchmark and those who remarked on ps4 in light of that, the seventh core is going to make ps4 almost as fast as i7 2700K, well 94% of it.
[Source]
??? aren't these cheap laptop based CPUs in the consoles? How is it going to be even close to ANY i7? Consider there's no AMD CPU that is as good as any i7...Let alone cheap console parts? Correct me If I'm wrong.
 
#9 ·
If AMD put 4 more cores into the APU from the start. These problem wouldnt need to address at all.

4 jaguar cores does not take up a lot of die size, it is still very small compared to the GPU on die.
 
#10 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clocknut View Post

If AMD put 4 more cores into the APU from the start. These problem wouldnt need to address at all.

4 jaguar cores does not take up a lot of die size, it is still very small compared to the GPU on die.
I second your statement. It also wouldn't draw much power too considering most of the power draw is from the GPU portion of the die. I wouldn't even mind if they brought up the clock speed to 2.5ghz as the jaguar users have been able to hit that in desktops with stock cooling.

Built a system for my little sister and college using a jaguar quad core and ASUS mobo, rumors are that you can overclock them pretty good. Highest known overclock is 3.2ghz.
 
#12 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mtcn77 View Post

Going off of Allegorithmic's benchmark and those who remarked on ps4 in light of that, the seventh core is going to make ps4 almost as fast as i7 2700K, well 94% of it.
[Source]
Quote:
Originally Posted by paulerxx View Post

??? aren't these cheap laptop based CPUs in the consoles? How is it going to be even close to ANY i7? Consider there's no AMD CPU that is as good as any i7...Let alone cheap console parts? Correct me If I'm wrong.
At best the CPU in the PS4 is 2x A6-5200 (PS4 has a lower clock-speed but it's probably close overall)

The A6-5200 gets a Passmark score of 2418, so even if we assume perfect scaling and just go ahead and lump the 8th core into the score we only get 4836.

A stock 2700k is at 8845.
A stock 2500k is 6460.

The closest comparisons seem to be the stock i7-920 with a score of 4992 and the stock i3-4130 with a score of 4784.

Of course this is only just passmark, I think it's a fairly good indication of multi-threaded performance.
 
#13 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by paulerxx View Post

??? aren't these cheap laptop based CPUs in the consoles? How is it going to be even close to ANY i7? Consider there's no AMD CPU that is as good as any i7...Let alone cheap console parts? Correct me If I'm wrong.
Jaguar has roughly the IPC of the Core 2 Quad processors at every GHz.

I don't understand how anyone would imagine them being close to an i7 in a PC environment. PCs are undoubtedly faster, will be from now on.

However if we don't manage to adopt DX12 soon enough, we'll be an optimization fad behind the consoles. DX12 is the new black.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FallenFaux View Post

At best the CPU in the PS4 is 2x A6-5200 (PS4 has a lower clock-speed but it's probably close overall)

The A6-5200 gets a Passmark score of 2418, so even if we assume perfect scaling and just go ahead and lump the 8th core into the score we only get 4836.

A stock 2700k is at 8845.
A stock 2500k is 6460.

The closest comparisons seem to be the stock i7-920 with a score of 4992 and the stock i3-4130 with a score of 4784.

Of course this is only just passmark, I think it's a fairly good indication of multi-threaded performance.
Precisely! What makes the PS4 perform is it's parallelism performance. However they're still working the kinks out like most multi-threaded environments. Programmers be like "WOAAAH! What's new found power after using a new compiler!". Sony will improve it's code paths and compilers for programmers, it'll out perform the i3 but at the cost of individual thread performance.
 
#16 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mtcn77 View Post

Going off of Allegorithmic's benchmark and those who remarked on ps4 in light of that, the seventh core is going to make ps4 almost as fast as i7 2700K, well 94% of it.
[Source]
If you can show proof of this claim, and a reputable source behind it, I will still probably call BS to that.

The PS4 has a weaker CPU than my laptop boasting the i7-2760QM, There's no way the chip in that thing is anywhere NEAR Intel at the moment. If they were that powerful, AMD wouldn't be on the verge of total bankruptcy,
 
#17 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Imglidinhere View Post

If you can show proof of this claim, and a reputable source behind it, I will still probably call BS to that.

The PS4 has a weaker CPU than my laptop boasting the i7-2760QM, There's no way the chip in that thing is anywhere NEAR Intel at the moment. If they were that powerful, AMD wouldn't be on the verge of total bankruptcy,
Irrelevant. However in a PC environment, the PS4 would be crushed by some laptops. The hardware utilization is very different in a console than it is from a PC unless Sony diverged from that altogether. The XBO is a glorified PC due to it's Windows environment. However PS4's unique hardware technical layouts give it huge optimization potential. PC platform is all over the place as far as optimization is concerned, there is no standard.
 
#18 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mtcn77 View Post

Going off of Allegorithmic's benchmark and those who remarked on ps4 in light of that, the seventh core is going to make ps4 almost as fast as i7 2700K, well 94% of it.
[Source]
This was hilarious. Almost spit at my monitor.
lachen.gif


What was funnier was watching everyone who took you seriously.
wheee.gif
 
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#19 ·
I don't intend to take credit for it, however I'm not the one quoting it out of context, either. Picking a pc doesn't permanently entitle you to a high horse, imo. This shouldn't rustle your jimmies, lol. It's the truth. Newer and better cpus are always going to show up, you can rest assured of that.
 
#20 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by mtcn77 View Post

I don't intend to take credit for it, however I'm not the one quoting it out of context, either. Picking a pc doesn't permanently entitle you to a high horse, imo. This shouldn't rustle your jimmies, lol. It's the truth. Newer and better cpus are always going to show up, you can rest assured of that.
Yep. Even if they're not better in performance they'll always be better in one way or another.

A huge problem with defining performance is the concept of how something is utilized. For example the PS4 could be focusing on the processor's strengths for it's instruction sets or whatever custom stuff could be done in the dark. It is completely proprietary! Or else we'd have a PS4 emulator already. If you do a benchmark by the instruction set you'll see some instructions perform exponentially better on AMD than Intel, Vice-versa.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going PCMR dumb. I'm a hardware guy, there are a lot of things between now and the end of the PS4's life that could dramatically improve it's performance without ever modifying the hardware. Optimizations of various sorts including the future potential of better multi-threaded work loads. PC always lags in this department.
 
#21 ·
iirc (the article is floating about on this site) the original xbox (not the 360) cpu could do 5-10 times the draw calls of a i7 920 each in their own environment, I think people dont realize the scale of how the pc platform, as a games machine, has been shafted by ms etc, that or they just dont want to admit it.
 
#23 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by benbenkr View Post

Funny why people actually care about this in the first place?

I mean, unless you're a dev (who could actually even tap into the 7th core properly)... this extra power doesn't even concern you, like the other odd 30 million PS4 owners.
Even to a dev it matters little. Perhaps it'll help on cookie cut titles, but seriously if you're a dev lower specs are easier because you don't have to produce a level of detail expected on a PC platform with it's various resolutions and graphics features. PC community is incredibly volatile.

Other than the reason everyone has them, Android phones, why do you think mobile gaming is such a strong market? Because it's easy to make games for them with limited expectations. Cost of production is really low, but the output in return is high.
 
#24 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by SpeedyVT View Post

Jaguar has roughly the IPC of the Core 2 Quad processors at every GHz.

I don't understand how anyone would imagine them being close to an i7 in a PC environment. PCs are undoubtedly faster, will be from now on.
.
Looks like those quad core i7 with HT might have starting to pull away from i5.(instead of similar performance now) More games from the future may be starting to use 7 threads at least.

As for core 2 quad ....Darn... my Q9650 gonna have its life extended again once DX12 come and single threaded performance become less important lol.
 
#25 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clocknut View Post

Looks like those quad core i7 with HT might have starting to pull away from i5.(instead of similar performance now) More games from the future may be starting to use 7 threads at least.

As for core 2 quad ....Darn... my Q9650 gonna have its life extended again once DX12 come and single threaded performance become less important lol.
It's not really a big deal using fewer. For example an i3 beats out an PD eight-core because of the stronger threads. Once you exceed a game's minimum requirements for the game's engine it's all down hill from there. It's why benchmarks invalidate themselves as time goes on. It's why we moved from 3dmark11 to Vantage especially when there was hardly anything new, GPUs started exceed the expectations of the software doubling tripling quadrupling the score while still only marginally faster than their predecessors.

We're going to see a lot of turf wars sadly. DX12 brings awareness to all the flaws in general computer designs and so companies that benefit little from it will try to stop it quietly or at least slow it's adoption. What's the point of DX12 if you can't milk out the customers with gimmicks and new stuff. NVidia and Intel do not what a quick adoption because they're leading in every category. DX12 will make Intel's pentiums and i3's pointless, possibly i5s.

We were already promised DX12 by fall last year, there has only been five games guaranteed with it.

Descent: Underground

Caffeine

Ashes of the Singularity

Arma 3

Ark: Survival Evolved

Either already out or will be soon.

I really can't wait like you, but we the customers are going to be caught up in some serious bloodshed.
 
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