Microsoft Explains Why They Did Not Go for Ryzen in Project Scorpio
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nicugoalkeper
This and PS4 is what makes Ryzen not that important for gaming and makes Intel stay on the same level of performance.
As long as 8 cores are enought for a console, games will not improve to much.
If you need a CPU only for gaming there is no need for something more that a 8 core CPU (my opinion). To many games are console games ported to the PC so if the port is ok no need for extra power.
JonasBeckman
Well on PC going by the various CPU comparison and gaming most games don't see that much of a gain above 4 cores or sometimes even just 2 cores there's a couple of exceptions but clock speed is still the deciding factor above core count if it's primarily for gaming.
As for 8+ core CPU's I thought you needed server variant models for that, AMD and Intel do have their hyper-threading thing though allowing each core to handle 2 threads each but it doesn't make up for a actual physical core.
(Making a 6 core register as if it has 12 but 6 are logical and 6 are physical, not that I know all that much on how this works.)
Though console development still differs from PC, would be interesting to see what this could do at a higher clock speed since it's running at "just" 2.3 Ghz although I guess with how compact the case is on these consoles heat buildup is a bit of a issue.
(Water cooled 3 Ghz limited edition? :P )
0blivious
Ryzen shines brightest in non-gaming situations so this isn't terribly surprising considering it's a box meant solely for gaming.
Fox2232
It is more of optimization. cat cores have different performance ration for each instruction type than other modern CPUs.
in other words, if they develop game for XBox One, then all instructions will run proportionally faster on Scorpio and it remains in balance without extra optimizations.
But if they used Ryzen, then one would have to think about weaknesses in Cat cores and evade certain instructions which are much faster in Ryzen.
As result Ryzen advantages would be wasted or MS would shoot themselves in foot by having games which are great on Scorpio and bad on XBox One.
Then, if Scorpio is made on modern manufacturing process, it will clock quite well within its TDP.
I would not see problem in Scorpio not having everything newest and greatest.
Ricepudding
Guess they finally came out and said that it is the same CPU just overclocked... Sigh, i have my worries about this and 4k 60, specially on games that are more CPU intensive, it's the big issue on the ps4pro i can't see that it won't be a problem on this... but i guess time will tell there when games come out on it.
As for them not using Ryzen, apart from money... i assume they are just too lazy to have the extra development time on their games, though aren't all xbox games now coming to PC? so not sure if that still holds water at this point
Lane
So you should maybe read this article. Forza 4k 60fps. one day work one men only.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/296227/Gears_of_War_and_Forza_devs_weigh_in_on_making_games_for_Scorpio.php
Fox2232
If cpu can feed draw calls to do 60 fps on 1080p, then it can do it on 4k with very same content.
I am happy that software renderers are thing of the past in games....
Fender178
I can see why they did this. If they were to have a bottleneck of some kind they could take a performance hit and games wouldn't run as well as they could hence the usage of the Jaguar cores instead of Ryzen. They already know how the Jaguar cores function so they know what tweaks they needed to get this working correctly.
Ricepudding
I'll believe it more when its actually out, GPU wise i can see it doing it. i'm more worried about CPU intensive games such as halo wars 2 as a prime example (though maybe the graphics will just be tuned).
I'm just hesitant to believe it till i see it atleast, hope i'm wrong might be nice to actually have a console hit a constant 60 frames per a second
Undying
Idk, DF said multiple that even a PS4 Pro GPU is bottlenecked by Jaguar cores in a specific games.
Loophole35
PS4 Pro's GPU is a bit of a bastard though as it's a second GPU tacked on and setup like crossfire not a single unit. This silicon will be a single GPU with 40 CU.
PrMinisterGR
It is a single unit, isn't it? They only said that it's mirrored like a "butterfly" (as Cerny said), so that they can disable half of it for games that have no boost mode or PS4 Pro awareness.
Denial
Well the exact quote is confusing:
But yeah, it's one large unit:
https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/4N6gx2rfRwkLEJLU.medium
From the ifixit teardown.
Up until like a few days ago I also thought it was two separate units.
Stormyandcold
Well, one of the more interesting things for me about the Scorpio is how the Jaguar cores deal with the GDDR5 memory bandwidth. Did they manage to customise it so the CPU can use it or is it more than it can handle?
Loophole35
Maybe I should have worded that better it's like you say but on one die. The fact that it can be cut in half like that leads me to think it is more of a CF setup when fully utilized as each Half would require it's own MC's and cashe's, no?
schmidtbag
I think it'd have been a mistake for MS to use Ryzen. Sure, it'd definitely help those with Ryzen-based gaming systems, but I think it'd just complicate things for developers. Scorpio, to my understanding, is supposed to be backward compatible, and using an architecturally different CPU would make micro-optimizations a nightmare. That ESRAM (or whatever it was called) in of itself made things a burden for devs.
Ryzen shines very bright in games, when the games are optimized for it (take DOTA2 for example). Unfortunately, Ryzen is mediocre (but adequate) for games that aren't optimized for it, which is basically all of them.
sammarbella
You have a strong point exposing these past articles specially coming from the (now) Xbox One PRO official PR : DF.
DF used to be labelled as pro-sony but now things changed (really?).
Maybe the "new" OCed Jaguar CPU (No Ryzen) can suddenly be able to perform miracles paired with a "new" OCed Polaris (no Vega).
You can't use the same medium size collar (even reinforced) from your old Doberman to control a bigger Rottweiler...there is too much neck to handle.
LOL
Denial
Is there even multiple articles? The only thing I found related to Jaguar being a bottleneck is one article on Batman: Return to Arkham only getting a 6fps uplift going from PS4 to PS4Pro - which was a 31% increase, identical to the CPU clock difference.
But it's one scene, in one game, on one console. Can't really form a conclusion on that. Can just be ****ty code. Can be a problem with the OpenGL/GNM implementation. Can be anything really.
Would like to simply see an overhead comparison between GNM and the Xbox DX12 implementation.
Yxskaft
Ryzen is a different architecture and the power gap would be too big to easily scale between Xbox One and Scorpio.
The better GPU will be used to increase the resolution and/or use medium/high settings compared to Xbox One's lower settings, but the CPU workload will remain the same for both Scorpio and Xbox One.
PrMinisterGR
I'm sure it's exactly like in the PS4. The CPU has a separate controller for the memory, which operates at around 20GB/sec for the PS4. In the PS4 pro there is also an extra GB of DDR3 in the system, so I don't know how all that is combined.
This is from the PS4:
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/PS4-APU.png
I wonder if that was just a turn of phrase from Cerny. It seems to me that they simply double the capacity of the old GPU, and he's just using it as a phrase. I see no reason for them to go into an actual design such as this.
