Why current consoles use X86-64 hardware – Part 1

50 Responses

  1. Macoman says:

    Good article,please put the next.

  2. Dexter says:

    I’d like to know why they chose to use a CPU that is designed for mobile devices. They used more of their transistor budget for the GPU than for the CPU yes, but still it bothers me why they used a CPU that would normally be put inside a tablet.

    Well written article, you explain technical stuff easy to understand for people who are not familiar with that kind of stuff. good job!

    • Tail870 says:

      Less heat, less space consuming, much cheaper…

      • PlaGeRaN says:

        You forgot power consumption and smaller form factor, think of the Nvidia Shield on steriods.

        Most phones, phablets and tablets are pushing for graphic content, since everything is online or streamed and for gaming as well.

        A TV in your pocket 😉

    • Penny says:

      Much lower costs 😉

      The goal was to create a console which emphasizes on GPU, not on CPU 😉

      The PS3 had a WEAK GPU (from Nvidia) but a very powerful cpu (Cell).

      And the AMD Jaguar 4-core module is guessed to be not more expensive than ~10 dollars. So they put 2 together, and thats 20 dollars combined.

      While the IBM Cell cost ~100 dollars. 5x more.

  3. Dan says:

    I don’t agree that the CPU on the consoles is on the same level as a 3rd gen IPAD.

    In first place you can’t directly compare different architectures (ARM-like and x64 in this case) I think that a more correct comparison would be with an intel atom processor (and the jaguar core has a big advantage over the atom,the complete support for OoO execution while the silvermont and airmont atoms only support OoO for the integers,having no support for floating OoO is a huge disadvantage.

    Also I don’t think this is much of an issue anyway,because most games are more GPU-bound than CPU-bound (I’ve seen people playing recent games with a pentium 4 and a decent graphics card)…now that’s impressive considering how awful the P4 was.

    Also I wouldn’t be so hard on the cell,it was made with a single (misguided) objective and that was extreme SIMD throughput using those synergistic processors,in fact in some very specialized code I’m sure that the cell would outperform the jaguar cores on the PS4.

    It was a good idea to stick with x86-64 for the consoles the architecture is well known by any programmer and it’s easy to achieve a good performance.

    • lol.... says:

      Nerd

    • no says:

      What do you expect from someone using the term “Xbone”?

      • Charles Fasano says:

        Anytime I see someone use that term, my brain, for whatever reason, fails to translate it as Xbox One. All my brain sees is X-Bone. I wish people would stop using that term. X-One or Xb-One would be better.

    • Penny says:

      More and more games are CPU-bound in 2016, my friend 😉 The times of when a game only required a powerful GPU and just some snail-cpu are over.

      That goes from “Nextgen-Minecraft” (coming for Highend-PCs), from all UNITY 5.4-games coming (from coming Indie-Blockbusters) and it goes to “Kerbal Space Program”,which is also using a tremendeously powerful cpu-physics.

  4. Mido says:

    I hate to be continued part but this was a great article ^^

  5. AGCrown says:

    Thanks for the positive feedback guys it is much appreciated. The next part of this article is very much in the works but it is taking a fair while given the amount of faff I have to complete while writing it, I will have it finished hopefully within 3 days time but cannot be completely sure when it gets posted as that is at the discretion of wololo.

  6. Gregar1000 says:

    Good read! Keep up the good work!

  7. Yattoz says:

    This kind of article is very cool, but I feel like you’re not at ease with english and/or vulgarization.

    First, I don’t see what you want to demonstrate through your article ; it’s quite blurry. I think that, even though an article is divided into several parts, each part should have a meaning by itself.

    Second, some of your sentences are long and confused. Maybe you can be inspired by “easy-english Wikipedia” ? I think it would clarify your thoughts and make your article much easier to read. And please, use commas, use periods, shorts sentences are much easier to read, especially when talking about technical stuff 😉

    Third, and that’s my personal thought, I like when technical terms are explained. In-Order and Out-Of-Order are two easy-to-grasp concepts : an In-Order processor will run a program in the very order, just as you would imagine a queue in a supermarket, whereas an Out-of-Order processor will reorganize the instruction by itself, so that the whole flow goes faster. Imagine you bake a cake. You can follow every instruction step-by-step. Or you can foresee that you have to pre-heat the oven, so you do it in the beginning. By reorganizing the tasks, you save a lot of time (the oven will heat up while you bake your cake). See ?
    Hence, if a processor has some tricks to reorganize intructions, these tricks needs to be written in the chip, physically. So Out-of-Order processor needs more room on their chip.

    In the end, I’d love to see some improvements in your articles, that are :
    – Setting up in the beginning what you want to show, what you want to demonstrate in your article,
    – using commas, making shorter sentences,
    – maybe using comparisons to be clearer ? I like comparisons, but that’s my opinion 😉

    In the end, I want to thank you for your implication, and I’d love to read you again. The best thing would be you thinking “okay, what can I do to make my articles better ?”, and thinking about the comments, and pointing out if they are relevant to you. So, yeah, thanks and see you !

  8. steveo says:

    Thanks for this, console hardware info is always good to know. Is what you written the main reason some ps3 games run not as good as the xbox 360 verson?

  9. Nice article, but i have to disagree with your disparaging remarks about the Cell, it was and still is a beautiful piece of hardware.

    • Penny says:

      The problem? It drains more energy than a Core i7 4-core + an AMD Phenom X6 together (over 150 watts) 😉 xD Thats a real problem in 2016.

      Since you can have that power with a 3-core custom PowerPC (which WiiU uses) now. And that only drains….15 watts sir. And its not dependent on Dark Silicon (everything which uses chips today and is produced UNDER 32nm is having Dark Silicon, that 3-core custom PowerPC in WiiU is not having Dark Slicon. It uses the same edram which Power7-cpus uses to prevent overheating and getting problems which AMD/Intel gets 😉

  10. asd says:

    The Cell was not in any way an atrocity. It can run today’s games in full hd if the developers wanted to (most of the first PS3 games run in 1080p), so assuming the Cell was an atrocity is so far from true.

    • Penny says:

      The Cell is still powerful yes. But its still old…and the PS3 only has 256 Mbyte of normal Ram.

      While todays consoles use GBYTES of Ram 😉 You cannot compare that.

      Developer of Bayonetta 2 said “Its not possible to run on PS3 or xbox 360”.

      And thats an older game allready. And if some guy like that developer says that, i would take his word.

      So the Cell is pretty good. But the Cell was coupled with a too low amount of Ram. And Cell is much much harder to program then even Wiius custom PowerPC with 3 cores. And that is also much faster than that old IBM Cell since its made by the same company.

      And as you know: The Cell was GOOD in SIMD. But very bad when it came to other tasks. So its no wonder its not being used anymore.

      Cell is good for number-crunching. But bad when it comes to forecasting games-events (branching).

      And game don´t only consist of pure SIMD-numbercrunching.

  11. MBA says:

    I find it interesting cause recently I started looking at the other side of this story, as in, how graphic cards have been evolving on PC and how consoles ended up with these specific ones. I have been checking a channel on youtube called AdoredTV, so while I guess it’s more about hearing what this other person says, he goes pretty technical on his explanations, how AMD was the only company in the market capable of doing these “APU”s for all 4 major consoles from this generation (PS4, XBone, WiiU and recently announced Nintendo NX), and how these things have been changing the PC market as well, specially the fight between the major gaming video card brands, nVidia and AMD.

    Considering he puts his resources on his videos, I think it could be an interesting check to complement your explanation on x86-64 console hardwares.

    • Penny says:

      dude. WiiU doesn´t use an APU. Only AMD itself makes APUs.

      WiiU uses a 3-Core custom – with many more registers added (see this article) MCM.

      That means: The WiiU uses 3 custom chips in 3 dies.

      And these dies then are connected together.

      Similar to how Intel made Core 2 Quad (with the difference here, that IBM did not seperate cpu-cores from each other to communicate via slow FSB).

  12. callmemaybe says:

    It’s just because it’s very expensive for company to develop custom processor to have the same graphical power in the end (with minimum difference).. so they now use an x86 architecture. The custom chip era is finished ^^ Nowaday it make no sense.
    It help porting games and developpers are used to them, so it’s a win win for the compagnies.

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    • Penny says:

      I don`t agree.

      PS4/Xbox one are maxed out after just 2.5 years.

      Thats why they have successors announced (or more specifically updates). While WiiU is not maxed out, and only coming UNITY 5.4-engine will be able to max WiiU out (With unknown games yet known to come).

      And thats how it works.

      PS4/Xbox one are just PCs now. Nothing to do special there. While Wiiu gets different games and no current game really was made for WiiU to being able to max the cpu out (Exception Zelda U, showing next month or bayonetta 2, that also showed a GLIMPSE of the future of cpu-powered games).

      So conclusion is:

      WiiU is a) one year OLDER than both PS4/Xbox one yet still not maxed out. And it will take 2-3 more years, to being ABLE to just max it out.
      Since the problem is => PowerPC-developers are getting rare and expensive. And it costs much more to make such games. But it will be done.

      And the end will be => The WiiU will have the longest lifecycle of all consoles this gen.

      And thats why they started to downgrade games for both x86-consoles now. Since they are no longer able to handle the real nextgen-Projects.

      While WiiU just WAITS to get a hand on Unity 5.4-games.

  13. Stevorkz says:

    Good article, keep it up 😉

    Bottom line is x86 is easier to program for because in the end it is the largest most well known architecture in general computing. So it makes sense to use it. In so doing it encourages people to open the system up too which is great.

    • Penny says:

      Yes. but the price is that your console will be maxed out much faster…Which now happened to both x86-consoles.
      Which is why they are allready exchanged by a faster revision. And that means PS4/Xbox One just lastest 3 years and then you allready need the next console.

      While WiiU is one whole year older and developers just STARTED making use of more cpu-cores on WiiU yet.

      See Discovery? It does better graphics than many PS4-games- with 100 animals climbing around at once… and yet the developer says “No multicore-support yet, wil be patched in with the next update and we plan to do UNITY 5.4-support too to allow desctruction-engine or other features”.

      So THIS is done with 1 Core @ 1.25 Ghz right now. Impressive!

      So yeah. It means => WiiU will last way longer than PS4/Xbox One. It will take much longer to max out a custom 3core-PowerPC with 3 mbyte Cache (no cache-coherancy), than it is to max out some simple x86-cores with just normal cache where you can do nothing special with it.

      WiiU for example allows it to run code faster on certain cores. On PS4 you cannot do that, since all cores are the SAME!

      On WiiU you can do CUSTOM things for the cpu (optimizations), since it even has Level 3-Cache to speak to (not used in many games yet), PS4 simply has no Level 3-Cache ability.

      People are TRYING to get 3-Core 1.25 Ghz ACCESS for Linux on WiiU right now.

      But until now they only have 256 kbytes Cache for 3 Cores @ 729 Mhz (Wii-clock, so thats only 2.9 Gflops x 3 = about 10 Gflops. only draining maybe 3 Watts or so while using that):

      Means limited access.

      Once they finally HAVE 3-cores at the full 1.25 Ghz and all 3 Mbytes of Cache (very important for a PowerPC @ 4 stagepipeline), they will find out the cpu is quite fast for what it does have (heat it dissipates and energy it needs)…

      Math says:

      Wiis broadway was => 729 Mhz and 256 Kbyte Cache => 2.9 Gflops.

      Now take that number x 10 (for 10x more bandwidth + 10x more Cache, each time you double the cache of a 4-Stage Pipeline RISC-cpu you double its performance!) = 29 Gflops. Per Core! And thats not with taking into account more Registers (which WiiUs Espresso has) or other things added.

      And now add 70% more Speed (Mhz) per core, so thats => 49.3 Gflops.

      Now use 49.3 and multiply it by 3 (Core-amount). Yes sir. Thats nearly 150 Gflops!

      The AMD Jaguar 8-core (@ 1.6 Ghz) is said to have like ~16 Gflops (each core can do 2 Gflops). And it drains the same 15 Watts, like IBM Espresso does. So AMD Jaguar drains 2 Watts per core (about), while IBM Espresso drains about 5-6 Watts per core (about 15 Watts in total, a bit more than 15 Watts indeed).

      Yes, so only about 15 Watts for 150 Gflops. So its 1 Watt for 15 Gflops.Thats is…well incredible if you ask me.

      And the IBM Espresso only can do those 150 Gflops, since it has eDRAM. Which makes it POSSIBLE for the 4-Stage Risc pipeline to not overheat (Dark Silicon).

      Which is the point why IBM does not shrink the PowerPC 4-stagepipeline design down to like ~28nm or even 22nm. Since it would simply overheat.

      Remember? PowerPC gets much much hotter than a comparable x86-processor!

      See? The IBM Espresso is only tiny tiny 30mm big. But still drains 15 Watts.

      While the AMD Jaguar has much less performance, and is nearly 100mm² big, but drains the same 15 Watts.

      So that means, each mm² on IBM Espresso gets much much hotter (100°C!) than the AMD Jaguar (which only gets like 60°C).

      If IBM Espresso would only have normal SRAM-cachecells (not specialized ones made by IBM), it would overheat at 1.25 Ghz.

      And it would have problems getting just half of that 20 Gbyte/s bandwidth for each core.

      • PlaGeRaN says:

        maybe you should have done this article, you sound more clued up on things than the author 😉

  14. BenoitRen says:

    I think this article is poor. To start, it could use some proofreading, because of confusing grammar and the use of “The next…” when you didn’t introduce the first yet. Second, when you write things like “It had a clock speed of 3.25GHz (if memory serves correctly)”, it tells me that you didn’t do your research.

    Finally, I know it’s only part one, but this article is rather short and barely says anything.

  15. PlaGeRaN says:

    In the words of Game of Thrones, “Part 2 is coming!”
    Nice write up and can’t wait for the next XD

  16. devilhunter says:

    @AGCrown

    The cell was not meant to be used exclusively for ps3, but for any general purpose computer. However, it had been adopted for the xbox and ps3 mostly. In other words, CELL failed….

    Nowadays, PowerPC Devs are in financial crises and they wont invest in such architecture. Using AMD/Intel based CPU is a much cheaper alternatives.

    I believe PowerPC will be introduced again in the next gen to end “Consoles are pimped PCs” argument.

    What I dont get it is why people starting to compare consoles to Pc of all the sudden? Both DreamCast and the Original Xbox used similar CPUs to the PC! Game cost way too much compared to the ones 10-15 years ago and for the same price tags, people should not expect exclusives anymore.

    Regards.

    • BenoitRen says:

      The Dreamcast did not use a CPU similar to PCs’s. It used an SH-4, which is a RISC CPU belonging to the SuperH family.

      The Xbox did use a CPU similar to PCs’s, and it was getting compared to a PC back in the day as well.

  17. dyay-em says:

    I read an article about cell.

    What it advertised before is that it has 1 PPE and 8SPE.

    1 was disabled to handle administration and the other one is disabled by default to favor production yield. So devs only have 6 spe’s to tinker with.

    Imagine if they have all spe to play with.

    I think cell still has way to go if you know how to program for it

  18. Humberto says:

    Why people still use to read news papers when in this technological world all is presented on web?

  19. freezy628 says:

    great article

  20. Sticker says:

    I think AMD has licenses of GDDR5, x86 and GPU so they will be the best candidate, just working with AMD and you had anything you need to build a custom (PC)

  21. Vitor Matos says:

    “The PS3 utilized the Cell Processor and was the combined engineering or IBM, Toshiba and Sony. Much of the CPU was designed by hand and is most certainly unique in terms of its physical design”

    I have already seem this phrase on other site:
    http://www.redgamingtech.com/why-ps4-and-xbox-one-moved-to-x86-64/

    This site explains really well the theme of this thread, and I recommend everyone that wants to know more about the matter to read it. But to see the same phrase, again here, care to explain @AGCROWN?

    • wololo says:

      Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I don’t take plagiarism lightly and am following up with the author about this.

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