At the Hot Chips conference earlier this week, Microsoft showed off several slides detailing the SoC used in its upcoming Xbox One gaming console.
The Xbox One uses a System on a Chip (SoC) designed by AMD’s Semi-Custom Business Unit. The processor features eight “Jaguar” AMD CPU cores, an AMD GCN (Graphics Core Next) based GPU with 768 shader cores, an audio co-processor, and 32MB of on-chip eSRAM.
The SoC, measuring 363mm^2 is manufactured on TSMC’s 28nm HPM process. The chip can interface with 8GB of DDR3 main memory with bandwidth of 68.3 GB/s or utilize the on-chip SRAM which has bandwidth of 102GB/s. The embedded SRAM is in addition to the smaller L1 and L2 caches. The slides indicate that the GPU and CPU can at least access the SRAM, though it still remains frustratingly unknown if the SoC supports anything like AMD’s hUMA technology which would allow the CPU and GPU to both read and write to the same memory address spaces without having to copy data between CPU and GPU-accessible memory space. It may be that the CPU and GPU can use the SRAM, but the same memory spaces can not be shared, though that may be the pessimist in me talking. On the other hand, there could be something more, but it’s impossible to say from the block diagram spotted by Semi-Accurate at the Microsoft presentation.
With that said, the slides do reveal a few interesting figures about the SoC that were not known previously. The Xbox One SoC has 47MB of on-chip memory including 32MB eSRAM used by the CPU and GPU and 64KB of SRAM used by the audio co-processor. The chip’s GPU is rated for Microsoft’s DirectX 11.1 and above graphics API. Further, Microsoft rates the GPU at 1.31 TFLOPS, 41 Gigatexels-per-second, and 13.6 Gigapixels-per-second. Additionally, the GCN-based GPU is able to hardware-encode multi-stream H.264 AVC MVC video and hardware decode multiple formats, including H.264 MVC. The hardware encoder is likely being used for the console’s game capture functionality.
The audio processors in the Xbox One SoC use two 128-bit SIMD floating point vector cores rated at 15.4 GFLOPS and “specialized hardware engines” and “signal processing optimized vector and scalar cores.”
The final interesting specification I got from the slides was that the SoC is able to go into a low power state that is as low as 2.5% of the chip’s full power using power islands and clock gating techniques.
You can find all of the geeky details in these slides over at SemiAccurate.
Going to pass on balnutz 1.
Going to pass on balnutz 1. I buy consoles to am on and relax, not to startup in a convoluted ad riddelled win 8 like interface.
I’m sure most of you weak sheep will just follow the carrot on he stick and buy one when the latest BF or COD comes out, LOL.
If PS4 doesn’t have obtrusive ads, that’s the way to go.
guess you don’t watch T.V.,
guess you don’t watch T.V., Hulu, drive a car, read a newspaper or surf the interwebz either?
oh, those are all ad free, my bad :/
Watch tv or read a newspaper?
Watch tv or read a newspaper? Are you like 90 years old?
If it’s not on the web, it probably isn’t worth looking at gramps.
you are the weak sheep,your
you are the weak sheep,your set on ps4 so you had to read a xbox one article bless you so much look at the adverts on this site, are you all stressed out poor boy.
there is no spam, like pcper
there is no spam, like pcper spam, lol.
supawall of txt.
Straight up get edjumacated
Straight up get edjumacated spam. That’s how you spam.
I will not lie, I felt a
I will not lie, I felt a little bad deleting it.
That, and I was scared nuking it would give the photovoltaic cells super powers.
at least the spam is
at least the spam is educational not a bad read
I’m a week sheep I ordered my xbox one the day after e3 and COD ghost of course 🙂 😛
Linux PC + Steam Big Picture
Linux PC + Steam Big Picture mode = Steambox. Stop waiting for the dream and make it yourself.
For some people, they want a
For some people, they want a PC for gaming but can’t afford it.
I think the new Xbox andPs4 is still a financial loss on each one sold and they plan to make it up on games and content?
If you sre completely new to pc gaming and have no parts and you consider a new build with a GTX 660 minimum for average rock solid 30fps+ on ultra settings for 1080p with some AA turned on, you’re looking at around a minimum $800 for a complete system including OS, parts, monitor and keyboard after taxes and shipping.
For some, the 400 or 500 entry for entry for a turn key solution seems “good enough” to get into the game even though we can all agree PC just crushes consoles at graphics past 1080p.
13 GP/s? 41 GT/s? 102
13 GP/s? 41 GT/s? 102 GB/s?
Common, that’s a joke. My 3 year old AMD HD5850 can do:
23 GP/s, 52GT/s and 128GB/s
When keeping in mind next gen systems games will all optimize for AMD GPUs, well I guess I’ll be golden for the next 6-7 years… *sigh*, that’s both a “yay” for won’t need to upgrade and a big “boo” because I’ll barely notice any improvements from current PC-centric games graphics-wise. Unless they go for all 720p again and 30fps on consoles, then I’ll need to upgrade for more oomph on the PC to reach an acceptable 60fps@1080p and MAYBE 4k HD in 6-7 years.
And don’t even get me started on the netbook CPU…
Anyway, they better not look any worse than the Unreal engine 4 demo ( which was running on a gtx 680 ) or it’s going to be a bigass letdown all in all.