AMD’s Q1 2016 earnings call, always a laugh-a-minute experience, has revealed that the company has contracts for three new gaming chips which it expects to bring in significant revenue.
The first these semi-custom chips is no doubt the one that will be found in the Playstation Neo, an improved AMD GCN with 36 CUs at 911MHz. The second chip, well let’s guess that’s for the Nintendo NX, that seems a fairly obvious choice.
That leaves us with custom chip number three. Sony have no plans for a Vita replacement, so it’s not that, and Nintendo wouldn’t be launching the NX and new handheld at the same time, which leaves us with two options. The Nintendo NX has two graphics chips or Microsoft are working on an Xbox One Neo.
Personally I’m more inclined towards the Nintendo option, the new console is meant to have two separate elements, but everyone likes a bit of gossip so let’s pretend it’s a new Xbox One, even though Microsoft have flatly denied any such thing exists.
Source: ARSTechnica
ron_mcphatty
Is that 36 cores? That’s a lot of cores. It’s amazing how processors have developed in the last few years, with the speeds coming back down into MHz but the number of the wee buggers multiplying like rabbits on viagra.
Shame about the Vita eh, but nice that it gets a mention here every now and then. I just finished Uncharted, I can’t believe that game got crammed into such a tiny machine, absolutely wonderful.
Avenger
CU stands for compute units, so not quite cores as we might imagine it traditionally. Each CU contains 64 shaders.
ron_mcphatty
Thanks mate, I’d totally misunderstood, need to go and learn what all these things mean.
beeje13
The main processor (CPU) for the neo is clocked at 2.1GHz, with 8 cores, if that’s what you mean?
But yeah they’re still cramming ever more cores/shaders (AMD calls them ‘stream processors’) in GPU’s, this one in the neo will have 2304. For comparison the best GPU AMD make has 64 CU’s or 4096 shaders.
What does make me wonder is that AMD don’t make any GPU core with 2304 shaders so it looks like some are disabled again to save costs by increasing yields. Or it’s even more custom/bespoke than the PS4 chip.
hornet1990
No “disabling again” about it. You get a constant number of identical dies out of a wafer, the number depends on the physical area each die takes up. A certain percentage of those dies will contain manufacturing flaws, and given that a GPU die is largely taken up by the compute units you can save those dies that have flaws (providing the rest of the die works) by simply fusing off the faulty CUs.
This is not a new practice, and is typically used to create the various tiers of a GPU model to hit different price/performance points by using the chips with fewest working CUs for the budget model etc. But the point is they all start off life intending to be the “full spec” die. In the case of a bespoke chip they’ll know the yields they’re getting from a particular process so they’ll intentionally design the die to have a larger number of CUs than required, in the expectation that they’ll just fuse off a certain number (including perfectly fine CUs) to achieve the desired spec.
This is also why the PS3 had 7 SPUs rather than the designed and fabbed 8 – the yields were terrible and the only way to make the chip viable was to accept the dies with only 7 functional SPUs.
FluBBa
Is that Nintendos new idea? A continuation of the Wii U but the second screen is complete handheld system (to replace the 3DS)?
camdaz
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more leaks about the NX, we’ll have to wait until E3 to find out, hopefully.