With yesterday’s news that Sony would be making an announcement regarding what most are assuming will be the Playstation 4 on February 20, things are really starting to heat up. Times like these are always exciting, as leaks and rumors continue to spill regarding the new consoles.
Nothing will be confirmed until after the official announcements, but the rumored specs coming from VG Leaks are starting to look pretty conceivable. You can see their Orbis specs here, and their Durango specs here.
Let’s have some fun, and compare the hardware specs directly. We’re going to focus on pure CPU, GPU, and Memory architecture here, so be sure to check out the links below for full details on the rumored specs via vg leaks:
LIVERPOOL SOC
- Custom implementation of AMD Fusion APU Arquitecture (Accelerated Processing Unit)
- Provides good performance with low power consumtion
- Integrated CPU and GPU
- Considerably bigger and more powerful than AMD’s other APUs
CPU:
- Orbis contains eight Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz, arranged as two “clusters”
- Each cluster contains 4 cores and a shared 2MB L2 cache
- 256-bit SIMD operations, 128-bit SIMD ALU
- SSE up to SSE4, as well as Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)
- One hardware thread per core
- Decodes, executes and retires at up to two intructions/cycle
- Out of order execution
- Per-core dedicated L1-I and L1-D cache (32Kb each)
- Two pipes per core yield 12,8 GFlops performance
- 102.4 GFlops for system
GPU:
- GPU is based on AMD’s “R10XX” (Southern Islands) architecture
- DirectX 11.1+ feature set
- Liverpool is an enhanced version of the architecture
- 18 Compute Units (CUs)
- Hardware balanced at 14 CUs
- Shared 512 KB of read/write L2 cache
- 800 Mhz
- 1.843 Tflops, 922 GigaOps/s
- Dual shader engines
- 18 texture units
- 8 Render backends
Memory:
- 4 GB unified system memory, 176 GB/s
- 3.5 available to games (estimate)
Storage:
- High speed Blu-ray drive
- single layer (25 GB) or dual layer (50 GB) discs
- Partial constant angular velocity (PCAV)
- Outer half of disc 6x (27 MB/s)
- Inner half varies, 3.3x to 6x
- Internal mass storage
- One SKU at launch: 500 GB HDD
- There may also be a Flash drive SKU in the future
Networking:
- 1 Gb/s Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WIFI, and Bluetooth
Peripherals:
- Evolved Dualshock controller
- Dual Camera
- Move controller
Extra:
- Audio Processor (ACP)
- Video encode and decode (VCE/UVD) units
- Display ScanOut Engine (DCE)
- Zlib Decompression Hardware
UPDATE: some people is confused about the GPU, here you have more info about it:
Each CU contains dedicated:
- ALU (32 64-bit operations per cycle)
- Texture Unit
- L1 data cache
- Local data share (LDS)
About 14 + 4 balance:
- 4 additional CUs (410 Gflops) “extra” ALU as resource for compute
- Minor boost if used for rendering
Dual Shader Engines:
- 1.6 billion triangles/s, 1.6 billion vertices/s
18 Texture units
- 56 billion bilinear texture reads/s
- Can utilize full memory bandwith
8 Render backends:
- 32 color ops/cycle
- 128 depth ops/cycle
- Can utilize full memory bandwith
(via vg leaks)
CPU:
- x64 Architecture
- 8 CPU cores running at 1.6 gigahertz (GHz)
- each CPU thread has its own 32 KB L1 instruction cache and 32 KB L1 data cache
- each module of four CPU cores has a 2 MB L2 cache resulting in a total of 4 MB of L2 cache
- each core has one fully independent hardware thread with no shared execution resources
- each hardware thread can issue two instructions per clock
GPU:
- custom D3D11.1 class 800-MHz graphics processor
- 12 shader cores providing a total of 768 threads
- each thread can perform one scalar multiplication and addition operation (MADD) per clock cycle
- at peak performance, the GPU can effectively issue 1.2 trillion floating-point operations per second
High-fidelity Natural User Interface (NUI) sensor is always present
Storage and Memory:
- 8 gigabyte (GB) of RAM DDR3 (68 GB/s)
- 32 MB of fast embedded SRAM (ESRAM) (102 GB/s)
- from the GPU’s perspective the bandwidths of system memory and ESRAM are parallel providing combined peak bandwidth of 170 GB/sec.
- Hard drive is always present
- 50 GB 6x Blu-ray Disc drive
Networking:
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct
Hardware Accelerators:
- Move engines
- Image, video, and audio codecs
- Kinect multichannel echo cancellation (MEC) hardware
- Cryptography engines for encryption and decryption, and hashing
(via vg leaks)
Orbis vs Durango Specs
| Sony Orbis | Microsoft Durango | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | ||
| Architecture | AMD Jaguar | AMD Jaguar? |
| Cores | 8 Cores Total (2 x 4) | 8 Cores Total (2 x 4) |
| Clock Speed | 1.6 GHz | 1.6 GHz |
| L1 Cache | 32KB Data, 32KB Instruction Per Core (512KB Total) | 32KB Data, 32KB Instruction Per Core (512KB Total) |
| L2 Cache | 2MB Per Module (4MB Total) | 2MB Per Module (4MB Total) |
| GPU | ||
| Architecture | AMD Southern Islands | AMD Southern Islands |
| Clock Speed | 800 MHz | 800 MHz |
| Compute Units | 18 | 12 |
| Performance | 1.84 Teraflops | 1.2 Teraflops |
| Memory | ||
| Architecture | 4 GB Unified GDDR5 176 GB/s (shared with GPU, est 3.5 GB available) | 32 MB ESRAM dedicated to GPU (102 GB/s) |
| 8GB DDR3 Unified System Memory (68 GB/s to system, 170 GB/s to GPU when in parallel with ESRAM) | ||
As you can see, there is a whole lot of AMD here. The first thing you’ll notice is that the CPU and GPU specs are almost identical, leading me to believe they are both using similar APUs based on Jaguar cores.
The only main difference here appears to be how the memory is designed. Sony opted for 4GB of unified GDDR5, which will be very fast. The OS only takes up about 512 MB, leaving 3.5 GB for everything else.
Microsoft decided to use external DDR3, which would normally lead to slower GPU performance. However they included 32MB of very fast RAM directly connected to the GPU, which can run in parallel to the system memory, allowing for fast access. Other rumors indicate that the Durango’s OS will take up 3GB of RAM, leaving about 5GB for games and everything else.
So on paper, Orbis looks like it will have the edge in pure GPU performance, but based on the hardware design, it looks like Microsoft is aiming to make the next XBOX a much more robust system. With HDMI input and video encoders, it may have some set-top-box features, and every one will come equipped with an improved version of Kinect.
What to Expect from Orbis and Durango
if you were expecting a huge leap in performance, you may be disappointedNow that the consoles use PC like designs, we can have a better grasp on what to expect. Keep in mind though, that these are still highly customized SOCs, and can’t be compared directly.The Jaguar CPU core is AMD’s next-gen low power core designed for low power laptops and tablets. It will show up in quad core laptops as Kabini, which are targeted to draw around 15-25W. AMD were demoing Kabini based laptop at CES this month, but I don’t know of any useful Kabini benchmarks yet. Tech Report ran a quick benchmark at CES, but it was an OpenCL accelerated application, so the GPU would have been used as well.
As for the GPU, at 1.2 to 1.8 Teraflops, we are looking at performance similar to a Radeon 7770 or 7850. The memory architectures are quite different though, so even this won’t be a direct comparison. However we can say that if you were expecting a huge leap in performance, you may be disappointed.
At the very least, we can finally say that there will be true “HD consoles” contrary to what the current consoles are capable of. Although the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 output games at 1080p, the vast majority of games are running at much lower resolutions and scaled up from there. 1080p at 60 fps should be expected of current gen games, but if they start pushing the envelope again, console gamers may have to continue to settle for 30 fps.
We will update this article if more reliable information comes to us. Be sure to stay in touch! Fun times are head!
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