Comment by qwytw

Comment by qwytw 3 days ago

> Are you saying that Nvidia couldn't make more powerful hardware for a high end console?

Hard to say. It tooks Qualcomm years make something that was superior to standard ARM designs. GPU is of course another matter.

> I'm certain Nvidia would have no trouble doing a high end console,

The last mobile/consumer CPU (based on their own core) that they have released came out in 2015 and they have been using off the shelf ARM core designs for their embedded and server stuff. Wouldn't they be effectively be starting from scratch?

I'm sure they could achieve that in a few years but do you think it would take them significantly less time that it did Apple or Qualcomm?

> Nvidia is incapable of building something higher end

I think it depends more on what Nintendo is willing to pay, I doubt they really want a "high-end" chip.

coder543 3 days ago

> I think it depends more on what Nintendo is willing to pay, I doubt they really want a "high-end" chip.

In this thread, we were talking about what Sony and Microsoft would want for successors to the PS5 and XSX, not Nintendo. Nintendo was just a convenient demonstration that Nvidia is clearly willing to partner with console makers like Sony and Microsoft.

> Hard to say. It tooks Qualcomm years make something that was superior to standard ARM designs.

> The last mobile CPU

I wasn't talking about Nvidia custom designing an ARM core, although they have done that in the past, and again, this wouldn't be mobile hardware. Nvidia is using very powerful ARM cores in their Grace CPU today. They have plenty of experience with the off-the-shelf ARM cores, which are very likely good enough for modern consoles.

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qwytw 3 days ago

> Nvidia is using very powerful ARM cores in their Grace CPU today
I'm not sure Neoverse is particularly (or at all) suitable for gaming consoles. Having 60+ cores wouldn't be particularly useful and their single core performance is pretty horrible (by design).
> which are very likely good enough for modern consoles
Are they? Cortex-X4 has barely caught up with Apple's M1 (from 2020)? What other options are there? ARM just doesen't seem to care that much about the laptop/desktop market at all.

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- coder543 3 days ago
  
  The Neoverse cores are substantially more powerful than something like Cortex-X4. Why would they not be suitable? It's hard to find benchmarks that are apples-to-apples in tests that would be relevant for gaming, but what little I've been able to find shows that the Neoverse V2 cores in Nvidia's Grace CPU are competitive against AMD's CPUs. I hate to draw specific comparisons, because it's very easy to attack when, as I already said, the numbers are hard to come by, but I'm seeing probably 20% better than Zen 3 on a clock-for-clock, single core basis. The current-generation PS5 and XSX are based on Zen 2. Zen 3 was already a 10% to 30% jump in IPC over Zen 2, depending on who you ask. Any hypothetical Nvidia-led SoC design for a next-gen console would be pulling in cores like the Neoverse V3 cores that have been announced, and are supposedly another 15% to 20% better than Neoverse V2, or even Neoverse V4 cores which might be available in time for the next-gen consoles.
  These gains add up to be substantial over the current-gen consoles, and as an armchair console designer, I don't see how you can be so confident they wouldn't be good enough.
  The CPU cores Nvidia has access to seem more than sufficient, and the GPU would be exceptional. AMD is clearly not the only one capable of providing hardware for consoles. Nvidia has done it, will do it again, and the evidence suggests Nvidia could certainly scale up to much bigger consoles if needed. One problem is certainly that Nvidia is making bank off of AI at the moment, and doesn't need to vie for the attention of console makers right now, so they aren't offering any good deals to those OEMs. The other problem is that console makers also don't want any break in compatibility. I've already addressed these problems in previous comments. It's just incorrect to say that the console makers have no other choices. They're just happy with what AMD is offering, and making the choice to stick with that. Nintendo will be happy using hardware made on a previous process node, so it won't interfere with Nvidia's plan to make insane money off of AI chips the way that next-gen console expectations from Sony or Microsoft would. I'm happy to admit that I'm being speculative in the reasons behind these things, but there seem to be enough facts to support the basic assertion that AMD is not the only option, which is what this sub-thread is about.
  Since you seem so confident in your assertions, I assume you have good sources to back up the claim that Neoverse V2/V3/V4 wouldn't be suitable for gaming consoles?
  
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  qwytw 2 days ago
  
  > Nvidia's Grace CPU are competitive against AMD's CPUs
  I don't think PS/Xbox are using AMDs 64+ core server chips like Milan etc.
  > I assume you have good sources to back up the claim that Neoverse V2/V3/V4
  These are data center CPUs designed for very different purposes. Neoverse is only used in chips that target very specific, highly parallelized workloads. The point is having a very high number 64-128+ of relatively very slow but power efficient cores and extremely high bandwidth.
  e.g Grace has comparable single thread performance to Ryzen 7 3700X (a 5 year old chip). Sure MT performance is 10x better but how does that matter for gaming workloads?
  I assume you could boost the frequency and build a SoC with several times less core than all recent Neoverse chips (if ARM let's you). Nobody has done that or publically considered doing it. I can't prove that it's impossible but can you provide any specific arguments why do you think that you be a practical approach?
  > substantially more powerful than something like Cortex-X4.
  Of course it's just rumors but Nvidia seems to be going with ARM A78C which is a tier below X4. Which is not particularly surprising since Nintendo would rather spend money on other components / target a lower price point. As we've agreed the GPU is the important part here the CPU will probably be comparable to an off the shelf SoC you can get from Qualcomm or even MediaTek.
  That might change in the future but I don't see any evidence that Nvidia is somehow particularly good at building CPUs or is close to being in the same tier as AMD, Intel, Qualcomm (maybe even Ampere depending if they finally deliver what they have been promising in the near future).
  Same applies to Grace, the whole selling point is integration with their datacenter GPUs. For CPU workloads it provides pretty atrocious price/performance and it would make little sense to buy it for that.
  
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