Project Scorpio Realistic Expectations Part 2: Memory

[Dehnus]

Linked below is the second part of a realistic, technical, breakdown of the Xbox “Scorpio” along with a comparison of the other technological leading consoles on the market today by forum member Dehnus. He will be in the thread to answer any questions someone may have. Stay tuned for more articles in this series.

http://unionvgf.com/blog/2017/06/06/project-scorpio-…ns-part-2-memory/

I changed thread starter to Dehnus.

 

[Sasquatch Montana]

Nice. I was wondering about this given the reveal is days away. Good work bra. Xx

 

[Registered User 1]

I hope the insides of the Xbox Karen looks as good as the renders.

I really hate the look of the cheap green PCB. Sure, I'll never actually see it... But knowing that it's in there...

 

[Two Pennys Worth]

An excellent write up. Thanks for taking the time to go into such depth. Even more hyped for Scorpio now.

 

[BDaddyK]

Awesome article Dehnus!

 

[Dehnus]

Nice. I was wondering about this given the reveal is days away. Good work bra. Xx

There were quite a few weeks lost between me and Plainview . Both have busy RL's to worry about . Between, Work, Volunteering and Family, their rests little time is for things like writing . I also deliberatly am waiting for more info on the CPU, as MS has been rather sparse about it, so there are two camps: 1. It's just an overclocked Jaguar/Puma. 2. It's a heavily modified Jaguar that puts it well above a regular one.

Personally I'm still in between the two camps, thinking it isn't quite 2, but it certainly isn't 1 either. So I'm waiting for more info on it.

Awesome article Dehnus!

Thanks BDaddyK. .

An excellent write up. Thanks for taking the time to go into such depth. Even more hyped for Scorpio now.

I think it looks quite clean, but then we've only seen renders. It also won't be visible anyway, so the colour of the PCB is not as important as say a PC with a glass window in it. As long as it uses quality parts, it should last you this generation.

Edit: I'll be going to bed, I'll reply again in the morning .

 

[D-V-ANT]

A good article for a bandwidth and memory. Very well explained.

 

[Mcmasters]

Sweet write up! That explained things very well. I actually understood it. Thanks for sharing.

 

[TDbank24]

Great job. Always appreciate someone willing to go the extra mile and break these things down. Keep up the good work!

 

[Dehnus]

A good article for a bandwidth and memory. Very well explained.

Sweet write up! That explained things very well. I actually understood it. Thanks for sharing.

Great job. Always appreciate someone willing to go the extra mile and break these things down. Keep up the good work!

Thanks, I just hope we'll get to learn a bit more about the CPU soon, as outside of the power management not much has been shared about it. There are some extra optimisations but they haven't gone much in depth about them yet. For instance the standard Xbox One can already offload a lot to the GPU regarding draw calls, but apparently Project Scorpio goes even further than that. Then there are some rumours regarding optimisations but none of them have been vindicated. Maybe at E3 some developers will finally share some much needed information as they aren't as bound by the NDA anymore. MS has been tight lipped more than ever this year, almost nothing made it out compared to other years .

 

[Sasquatch Montana]

I think the CPU won't be all that special. But then I don't find Jaguar all that bad, people bitch about 60fps because of Jaguar, and yet we have seen lots of games jump from 30fps to 60fps this gen.

Also as an iterative console, there's no great need to go further when Nintendo dropped out of the tech race and the only thing to top it will be PS5 in a couple of years. This console won't be king for long, but people be tripping of they think Zen is going to provide a more meaningful leap then Jaguar did over PS360

 

[Dehnus]

I think the CPU won't be all that special. But then I don't find Jaguar all that bad, people b**** about 60fps because of Jaguar, and yet we have seen lots of games jump from 30fps to 60fps this gen.

Also as an iterative console, there's no great need to go further when Nintendo dropped out of the tech race and the only thing to top it will be PS5 in a couple of years. This console won't be king for long, but people be tripping of they think Zen is going to provide a more meaningful leap then Jaguar did over PS360

Well, I'm mostly interested in the power management part of it. As they seem to be pretty proud of it themselves. Outside of that it is mostly a jaguar with maybe some things applied that AMD learned from developing ZEN. And that in itself is not a bad thing, It is clocked quite a bit higher than a standard Xbox One, and drawcall wise rendering at a 4K resolution wouldn't be adding much more strain on the CPU (it is why you test CPU's on low resolutions so that they become CPU bound and not GPU bound). That said, if they aim for having 1080P30FPS games run at 60FPS as well, then they would need some more oomph.

The higher clock + maybe a few optimisations thus allowing for a higher IPC, would then be very much needed. But as it looks now, it seems to be mostly a Jaguar/Puma. But I'll be keeping my eyes and ears open during the E3, I consider that more or less the deadline for these announcements. Granted they could show us more later on the GDC if they did do some major optimisations, but I can always write an addendum by then.

I more or less expect a standard Puma core setup. This to allow for higher clocks and more energy efficiency (less leakage), and since Puma+ (Carrizo-L) allows for speeds up to 2.5ghz, 2.3 ghz is very well attainable with 8 cores and good yields. This with improved power usage planning (as described by Microsoft) and offloading of drawcalls to the graphics part of the APU, could actually punch well above it's weight. But nothing fancy like higher IPC. Maybe other improvements to help make it more efficient with the same IPC (less waiting on other processes means Instructions are used more efficient and the same IPC goes a bit further). But that is already reaching. Unless we get more information we can safely assume it is just a PUMA+, with the ARM Cortex A5 core removed for better yields and saving Die space.

 

[Almighty_bob]

Linked below is the second part of a realistic, technical, breakdown of the Xbox “Scorpio” along with a comparison of the other technological leading consoles on the market today by forum member Dehnus. He will be in the thread to answer any questions someone may have. Stay tuned for more articles in this series.

http://unionvgf.com/blog/2017/06/06/project-scorpio-…ns-part-2-memory/

I changed thread starter to Dehnus.

Now that they've upped the available amount of RAM to 9 gigs, you need to make an update to all your nice graphs ☺

 

[Dehnus]

Now that they've upped the available amount of RAM to 9 gigs, you need to make an update to all your nice graphs ☺

It's not that big an impact, granted it's nice of course, but in the grand scale of things it is just a number. What I found nicer news is that games that do not use the full amount, will be allowed to use the free memory as cache. This would allow for some major speed increases in loading . Especially linear games, if you can say, preload 25% of the next level already, that can mean a good 10 seconds of an otherwise 40 second load screen .

 

[pravus]

Thanks, I just hope we'll get to learn a bit more about the CPU soon, as outside of the power management not much has been shared about it. There are some extra optimisations but they haven't gone much in depth about them yet. For instance the standard Xbox One can already offload a lot to the GPU regarding draw calls, but apparently Project Scorpio goes even further than that. Then there are some rumours regarding optimisations but none of them have been vindicated. Maybe at E3 some developers will finally share some much needed information as they aren't as bound by the NDA anymore. MS has been tight lipped more than ever this year, almost nothing made it out compared to other years .

Supposedly they are doing a talk on the CPU/GPU SoC in August @ Hotchips 29.

 

[SpartanDawgX1]

An additional 12% of usuable memory for a fixed box that can't be upgraded seems pretty significant to me.

 

[Dehnus]

Supposedly they are doing a talk on the CPU/GPU SoC in August @ Hotchips 29.

Oooh, I'd more than welcome that. I'd love to hear what optimisations they did, especially on the power use side of things. I mean they seem pretty confident about that part of it, so if it is that energy efficient, who knows what it can do "scaled down" to a lower clockrate with less Graphical CU's . You might actually get a diskless, ultra thin Xbox One Standard next year, when they are ready for another die shrink . Thanks for the tip .

 

[Dehnus]

An additional 12% of usuable memory for a fixed box that can't be upgraded seems pretty significant to me.

Oh it's nice, but it isn't as big a thing as the box already had a major memory advantage over the old Xbox One( S ). But allowing preloads for all games, including non scorpio optimized games? That can be something major. Remember that the Xbox One has 4.5 GIGS available to games (especially older games that still had to give more of it's memory to the OS, than the newer ones). It basically would mean you can load twice as much into the available memory as 4.5 * 2 = 9 . Now that is putting it a bit too simple, and there are some more things one needs to take into account, but non optimized early games will be able to take some serious advantage of this. Take Ryse, while you're playing one level, you can preload the next almost completely into memory . So for most of the assets you'll only have to switch pointers . It is like a "double buffer" for games .

 

[OneBadMutha]

Great job per usual Dehnus. You do a good job with analogies and dumbing down the explanations.