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Was 8 CPU cores enough for 9th gen consoles? Strix Halo, the prefect console.

Loxus

Member
It doesn't make any sense when you can use that extra space on the APU to have more GPU cores that are much faster in physics simulation.
So if Sony did went with 16 CPU cores and still managed to keep the 40CUs, what would you say then?

PS5 literally would of had 16 Cores if die size wasn't a problem.
 

mrcroket

Member
So if Sony did went with 16 CPU cores and still managed to keep the 40CUs, what would you say then?

PS5 literally would of had 16 Cores if die size wasn't a problem.
They wouldn't have done it anyway, 16 cores are not useful for video games and it would have been more expensive.

Videogames, unlike other types of software, are difficult to parallelize and benefit much more from fast cores than many cores.
 

Loxus

Member
They wouldn't have done it anyway, 16 cores are not useful for video games and it would have been more expensive.

Videogames, unlike other types of software, are difficult to parallelize and benefit much more from fast cores than many cores.
Did you even watch the video or even read the article?

The only reason the PS5 didn't get 16 cores is because of die size. We need to stop looking at PC. PC had SSDs for years and never properly utilized it.

Consoles had to start properly utilizing SSDs before PC started with DirectX Storage and GPU decompression to get the best out of SSDs.

Same thing with VRAM. Consoles with their 16GB of VRAM raised the minimal VRAM requirements on PC.

The same would of happen with 16 cores. On Consoles, devs would of utilized the 16 CPU cores. Then 16 cores on PC would then be utilized.

If 16 CPU cores were not useful in video games, devs wouldn't have requested it in the first place.
 
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YOU PC BRO?!

Gold Member
The more I think about it the more it becomes likely to me that Strix Halo might be an upcoming xbox SoC. It would be beneficial for MS to pull a PS3 style move but they could only do that after having bought the most popular 3rd party games. The PS3s problem was that PS2 relied on a lot of 3rd party games for its audience. PS3 got poor 3rd party support for popular games with the CPU shift to more cores and they didn't have any first party as popular as GTA, CoD etc to show any benefit to that shift at the start of the gen. If you own the biggest 3rd party games then this is no longer a problem. You can capitalise on it. You can have games you've developed run like crap on 8 core PCs and PS systems. Games like CoD, Minecraft, Fallout, Doom, Elder Scrolls, etc can become heavily CPU bound and run worse on everything except xbox and maybe the latest AMD CPUs. Wouldn't land them in legal trouble either because they can just point to an 8 core CPU in other machines and talk about technical feasibility.

Strix Halo in rumoured next gen Xbox handheld?
 
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Im no techie but I've been reading through this thread and the general consensus is that more cores doesn't equal more better.

Fewer cores equals better it seems so why didn't PlayStation go with a 4 core CPU at very high clocks (double the current if possible) ?

Would it have meant that a much more expensive and sophisticated cooling solution would have been required? Perhaps pushing up the price of the console? and would 4 superfast cores help to usher in next gen AI and physics in videogames?
 
16 cores would have led to a substantial decrease in clock speed, which would mean even worse performance in the vast majority of games. Even Unreal 5 struggles with populating high thread counts.
Even unreal lol? Unreal is terrible at multithreading it's probably the worst modern engine at it, part of it has to do with the direction it took with it's UE4 features.
 

Three

Gold Member
Im no techie but I've been reading through this thread and the general consensus is that more cores doesn't equal more better.

Fewer cores equals better it seems so why didn't PlayStation go with a 4 core CPU at very high clocks (double the current if possible) ?

Would it have meant that a much more expensive and sophisticated cooling solution would have been required? Perhaps pushing up the price of the console? and would 4 superfast cores help to usher in next gen AI and physics in videogames?
For most games out now faster higher clock cores means better performance than more cores because most games and engines weren't written for more cores but it also means more heat. More cores is beneficial but it also means those who write the game engines need to do more work to split and offload tasks to more cores.
 
Sounds like the general purpose design is quite suboptimal today and will be a limiting factor going forward as well.

I guess 1 superfast core plus 2 or 3 okay fast ones plus 4 or 8 smaller slow ones for minor stuff would fit the needs better (kinda like Cell was). Same with RAM where GDDR is used for system instead of using it for what it is designed to be. So some LPDDR4 or whatever for the unimportant stuff would be better and more cache plus maybe something like nextHBM for the real graphics stuff. That would add complexicity and you would need to design everything more specific to what each unit can and should do, which can't be possible between different genres of games. But bottlenecking every one of the various units similarly could be the goal, while today a bottleneck is really just one place and all the other units idle and mess up frametiming or whatever happens in current engines.
 

Skifi28

Member
Im no techie but I've been reading through this thread and the general consensus is that more cores doesn't equal more better.

Fewer cores equals better it seems so why didn't PlayStation go with a 4 core CPU at very high clocks (double the current if possible) ?

Would it have meant that a much more expensive and sophisticated cooling solution would have been required? Perhaps pushing up the price of the console? and would 4 superfast cores help to usher in next gen AI and physics in videogames?
I don't think it's a "less is better" situation. More like 16 is too much and requires too many concessions for little gain. 8 just happens to be the sweet spot right now. Considering consoles reserve about 1 core for running the OS, 4 would have not been nearly enough.
 
Of course they wanted 16 cores. Publishers and developers love anything that allows them to minimize the time, money, and effort they spend on actually optimizing their games.
 
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