News - Sony PlayStation 4 is powered by an 8-core AMD Jaguar processor

[MattEvansC3]

Just want to point something out, at no point have Sony stated its a Jaguar core, that rumour was started by Eurogamer based on a leak because it coincided with the announcement of the Jaguar core.

The diagram showed for the Orbis (PS4) and Durango (Next Xbox) showed a 8 core CPU and a separate northbridge. The Jaguar is a upgrade to the Bobcat core which was designed exclusively for APUs and it tops out at 4 cores.

Also the Bobcat core is equivalent to a Athlon X2 CPU in power and AMD stated the Jaguar is to be slightly more powerful than the Bobcat (think Bulldozer to Piledriver).

[Rob_B]

Depends on the power consumption combined I guess, I didn't even have a 7850 in my desktop and considering the desktop part is 250W and the PS4 will be xWatts then spectacular is subjective?

[Terbinator]

Just want to point something out, at no point have Sony stated its a Jaguar core, that rumour was started by Eurogamer based on a leak because it coincided with the announcement of the Jaguar core.

The diagram showed for the Orbis (PS4) and Durango (Next Xbox) showed a 8 core CPU and a separate northbridge. The Jaguar is a upgrade to the Bobcat core which was designed exclusively for APUs and it tops out at 4 cores.

Also the Bobcat core is equivalent to a Athlon X2 CPU in power and AMD stated the Jaguar is to be slightly more powerful than the Bobcat (think Bulldozer to Piledriver).

Its two Jaguar modules.

[Terbinator]

Depends on the power consumption combined I guess, I didn't even have a 7850 in my desktop and considering the desktop part is 250W and the PS4 will be xWatts then spectacular is subjective?

A 7850 is around 150W.

[Rob_B]

Cheers, I just googled it and saw 250w, but still...!

2 Jaguar modules? with on-die GPU? So how is that going to work? upto 25Wx2 for the CPU, then an unknown amount for GPU, isn't the super slim consumption only about 70W in total? I wonder if they'll be able to include the PSU internally with this one.

[Terbinator]

Cheers, I just googled it and saw 250w, but still...!

2 Jaguar modules? with on-die GPU? So how is that going to work? upto 25Wx2 for the CPU, then an unknown amount for GPU, isn't the super slim consumption only about 70W in total? I wonder if they'll be able to include the PSU internally with this one.

It was included with the Phat? I'm not sure about the Slim offerings.

Bear in mind that the 360/PS3 launched well over 200W i'd say we're in safe territory TDP wise.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Its a console not a desktop PC,so it can't be have parts with relatively high TDPs.

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/rele.../130221a_e.pdf

Main Processor Single-chip custom processor
CPU :  x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”,  8 cores 
GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS,  AMD next-generation Radeon™ based 
graphics engine
Memory GDDR5 8GB

So an 8 core Jaguar CPU and a 1152 shader GCN core with 8GB of DDR5??

Bandwidth is meant to be 176GB/s which compares well to the desktop HD7850 and HD7870!!

It seems rumours indicated the part is based around an HD7970M,to I suspect at least HD7850 level performance.

Pitcairn,ie,the GPU used in the HD7870, has 20 EUs with 1280 GCN shaders.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Also the Bobcat core is equivalent to a Athlon X2 CPU in power and AMD stated the Jaguar is to be slightly more powerful than the Bobcat (think Bulldozer to Piledriver).

A Jaguar core supposedly has 15% more IPC,10% higher clockspeeds,,and a much improved FPU.

[kompukare]

Yes, exactly. 7850 without any binning is under 150W in Furmark, Jaguar is unknown but maybe 20W or. Plus HDD and other bits but I'd say max is 250W.

Don't get all the negatives about an 8 core Jaguar. For both die-size and power reasons Tahiti and Piledriver were never in the running. Tahiti can easily be 200W+ and 8 core Piledriver would be 125W+. And Tahiti is 365mm² while Pitcairn is 212mm². While Jaguar's size is AFAIK still an unknown, Piledriver is 315mm². There's no way AMD or Sony would want to fab a 680mm² chip - the yields on that would be very very poor indeed. Pitcairn + Jaguar is probably more like 260mm² or so.

And Intel i5/i7 were never an option because Intel wants too much for their stuff. Anyway, while SB/IB is very efficient, part of the reason Intel beat AMD so much in games is also to do with compiler optimizations etc. But in mainstream x86 applications re-compiling is not an option except maybe for Linux distros where all the source is available - and even then re-compiling would only optimise ISA extenstions etc, it would do almost nothing about threading.

Console code is different. For both PS4 and the next Xbox, the CPU is a 8 core Jaguar and all the code will be compiled and optimised for it. Threading will be a necessity and developers can't write poorly scaling code and hide it behind fast single threaded performance. SB/IB i5/i7's are great but they do encourage 'lazy' programming (no I know breaking a problem down into parallel parts is hard).

[jim]

So it's basically big on the CPU, with a decidedly average graphics card, that won't be as good for gaming as last year's top PCs, and probably next year's average PCs. Good to see everything's normal.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So it's basically big on the CPU, with a decidedly average graphics card, that won't be as good for gaming as last year's top PCs, and probably next year's average PCs. Good to see everything's normal.

I don't know what GPU you think most people are running in their gaming systems,but the PS4 has a better GPU than me and all my friends.

The HD7850 is GTX570 level in Crysis3 and with the fact that you have less overhead,it probably is much better in reality. This GPU probably runs at a similar clockspeed to a desktop HD7850 and has more shaders too.Also,it appears memory bandwidth is actually comparable to the desktop versons too.

The PS3 GPU had half the ROPs and memory bandwidth of the desktop GPU it was based upon.

[watercooled]

Anyone expecting more that this wasn't being reasonable TBH, as others have said, they're limited by power, heat and cost among other things.

Jaguar is actually meant to be considerably more powerful than Bobcat, it's a highly redesigned uArch, BD>PD changed very little in that regard. Consumer Jaguar APUs are said to go up to 4 cores, but it has been designed to be more modular than Bobcat which was effectively limited to 2 cores anyway.

We don't know really anything more than rough details we've already heard in rumours yet, for instance will this be a single-die solution, which would likely be fairly big, and give possibly less-than-ideal yields for such a high-volume part? I wonder if either MFR decided to use interposers and a few smaller dies?

Edit: Seems it will be a single die, at least for CPU+GPU.

[Terbinator]

Anyone expecting more that this wasn't being reasonable TBH, as others have said, they're limited by power, heat and cost among other things.

They've superseded early rumours anyway by doubling up on RAM. They've more than delivered in that regard.

[sykobee]

The "light bar" IS a Move type controller; when he was talking about it lighting up in different colours, that was purely to differentiate between multiple players, he then went on to talk about how the stereo camera can use the light bar to locate its position in 3D space. You need to stop taking things in isolation, it changes the context completely.

I guess the console, with a suitable multi-viewing-angle television, could use the determined position of the players' controllers to set the TV to display that user's screen in their direction automatically.

If you get what I mean.

I should patent this.

[MattEvansC3]

Also the Bobcat core is equivalent to a Athlon X2 CPU in power and AMD stated the Jaguar is to be slightly more powerful than the Bobcat (think Bulldozer to Piledriver).

A Jaguar core supposedly has 15% more IPC,10% higher clockspeeds,,and a much improved FPU.

Which will still put it in the ballpark of the Bobcat performance, and here's HEXUS's own report on the Bobcat's performance http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/27517-amd-releases-bobcat-performance-figures/

The Cat family of cores is not designed for gaming or any form of intensive workload, that's for the Dozer core family.

[jim]

I don't know what GPU you think most people are running in their gaming systems,but the PS4 has a better GPU than me and all my friends.

The HD7850 is GTX570 level in Crysis3 and with the fact that you have less overhead,it probably is much better in reality. This GPU probably runs at a similar clockspeed to a desktop HD7850 and has more shaders too.Also,it appears memory bandwidth is actually comparable to the desktop versons too.

The PS3 GPU had half the ROPs and memory bandwidth of the desktop GPU it was based upon.

I know it does - as I said, it's worse than last year's top PCs, and probably compared to next year's average PCs.

If you're referring to the "decidedly average graphics card", then I mean over the life of the console. Like the PS3, they seem to have gone for the big numbers on the CPU and not so much with the graphics.