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AMD Creates Quad Core Zen SoC with 24 Vega CUs for Chinese Consoles (anandtech.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD has cornered the x86 console market with its handy semi-custom mix of processors and graphics. While we slowly await the next generation of consoles from Microsoft and Sony, today AMD and Zhongshan Subor announced that a custom chip has been made for a new gaming PC and an upcoming console for the Chinese market.
The announcement states that a custom chip has been created for Subor that is based on four Zen cores running at 3.0 GHz and 24 compute units of Vega running at 1.3 GHz. The chip is supported by 8GB of GDDR5 memory, which the press release states is also embedded onto the chip, however it is likely to actually be on the package instead. [...] Assuming that this custom chip is a single chip design, with CPU and GPU, this means that AMD is handily gaining custom contracts and designing custom chip designs for its customers, even for consoles that won't have the mass western appeal such as the Xbox or Playstation.
The announcement states that a custom chip has been created for Subor that is based on four Zen cores running at 3.0 GHz and 24 compute units of Vega running at 1.3 GHz. The chip is supported by 8GB of GDDR5 memory, which the press release states is also embedded onto the chip, however it is likely to actually be on the package instead. [...] Assuming that this custom chip is a single chip design, with CPU and GPU, this means that AMD is handily gaining custom contracts and designing custom chip designs for its customers, even for consoles that won't have the mass western appeal such as the Xbox or Playstation.
but can it play Crysis?
Who will create videogames for this chinese console?
For a long time real consoles were banned so you had things like the iQue player which was a modded n64.
that's the trouble with making everything x86 DirectX boxes, it's easy enough for a large competitor to move in. Sony/Microsoft have never been able to develop a definitive identity like Nintendo has. e.g. there's no one game everybody floods to their platform for and that they control. No Mario, no Zelda, no Smash. Halo's cool and all, but there's a dozen shooters that can replace it. Same goes for Sony's first party stuff.
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When you get a Chinese CEO, it's quite natural that first you let chinese producers use your x86 license for doing their shit (i wonder what legal loophole they found), and then that you start powering chinese consoles.
Let's see what's next. Maybe chinese AMD? probably not, USGov would block it at the start
You say that as if the western market was much bigger than the Chinese market.
Europe population 741.4 million (2016)
U.S.A. population 325.7 million (2017)
Mexico population 127.5 million (2016)
Canada population 36.29 million (2016)
Europe + U.S.A. + Mexico + Canada = 1.231 billion
China population 1.379 billion (2016)
Granted, not everyone in China will be able to afford the console, but not everyone in the other regions/countries will be able to afford one either.
#DeleteFacebook
What's most eye opening is the stats on the Xbox One X, it still has more horsepower than all of them. Although the cores are clocked a little slower, there are double the CPU cores and almost double the GPU cores, and 50% more memory. On paper it's the winner.
pssst. there are BILLIONS of chinese people and their government doens't like the western (free) internet. so building a custom chinese console specifically for the chinese market may be a good way to meet the growing chinese demand for games with the added benefit/limit of internet freedom! PROFIT.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Median household income is about EIGHT TIMES higher in the US that in China.
Median household disposable income in the US in $47,000, in China $5,271.
OECD (2018), Household disposable income (indicator). doi: 10.1787/dd50eddd-en (Accessed on 03 August 2018)
In other words, the US is the rich people, who can spend hundreds of dollars on games.
98% of the world's population makes less than $25,000/year, so when you're selling expensive toys not all countries are equally important markets.
Give the PLAAF two months and they'll have it tied to enough RF ADC chips to equip a low-observable airframe with an LPI EASA... All courtesy of AMD.
While Nintendo and Sony blaze ahead in interface design and technological innovations, Microsoft continues to outpace both by innovating on what is does best: marketing.
Only 1% of Chinese households make more than $90,00. 80% of Americans do.
Being YOUNG and rich is even less common in China. Much more of US disposable income is young people who tend to buy video games. So around 0.5% of China is young people with significant disposable income, or about 6 million people.
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I see a future where, like the floating casino aircraft carrier being actually purchased from Ukraine by China to be an aircraft carrier in the Chinese military, these console targeted chips will be diverted into super-computer use.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
At the current rate of escalation of Trump's trade wars, cheap Chinese junk will be more expensive than American junk electronics.
Fortunately most of us won't have to choose a new game console to adopt because we'll all be unemployed. I predict 20% unemployment, and 50% under-employment by 2020. #MAGA
I meant $90,000. I copy and pasted that sentence from one post to the other.
Please. Any average PC of the same price (just the box and mouse/keyboard) has about ten times the power without breaking a sweat.
The only problem with PCs, is that nobody created a certification program. You could just have "Gaming PC 2018" badges, that certify that a system can play all games that support that platform. It would be exactly like a modern console.
Sure, you could not use the specific intricacies of a particular set of hardware, but only fixed standards (like Vulcan 1.0) and certain guaranteed performance properties, but you would not have to either, because the PC hardware would not be total shit, like consoles.
> Shanghai became one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Okay, you want to focus on Shanghai for a moment. Shanghai median income is $13,000 and like you said it's one of the most expensive cities in world in terms of housing and other necessities. Leaving a disposable of very near zero. Where I'm sitting in Dallas median income is $63,812 - almost five times as much as the great Shanghai. Apartments here also cost less than a fourth as much, leaving median disposable ten times as high as Shanghai.
Shanghai, the neighborhood in Mattaponni, Virginia, isn't actually part of China. I guess the very first statistic on that page you looked at didn't top you off:
Total Population 658
$13K and change is what the China government reported to the World Trade Organization.
If you prefer to pull numbers from the popular press, China Daily reports Shanghai users of the career web site Zhaopin (think Monster.com) average 9,802 yuan per month, which is $17,218.68. Obviously fast food jobs and such aren't advertised there, so it skews high.
Forbes reports $13,620
https://www.forbes.com/sites/k...
> Posting wrong numbers to Slashdot isn't going to do a lot. If
Yeah, it just makes you look silly when you confuse a neighborhood of 658 people with a city of 24 million.
Tell you what, if you stay away from the ad hominems and aggressive attitude, I'll try not to make you look like a complete moron. Deal?
I would actually rather have such a console than whatever PS or Xbox console comes next, it sounds like there's a lot of power under the hood and tencent will probably have the engine/publisher market sewed up soon
I don't know if you happened to see my initial post in this thread. It included things like:
--
Median household disposable income in the US in $47,000, in China $5,271.
OECD (2018), Household disposable income (indicator). doi: 10.1787/dd50eddd-en (Accessed on 03 August 2018
--
Just a friendly comment on that - :)
I've noticed that when people puts APA format citations in their Slashdot posts, citing globally authorative sources such as OECD:
a) They often know what they are talking about
b) I better bring my A game of I intend to debate them
You may recall the China Post page I linked to reported salaries from a site similar to Monster.com, so tech jobs and such. That number was $17K and change.
Compare $58K as I recall in D/FW (Texas), while a 1,000 SQ foot apartment in Shanghai can be $750,000, and I got a 2,350 square foot house for $240K. So real estate per square foot is far more expensive in Shanghai, while even tech salaries are about 70% less.
I think if I were selling expensive toys, I'd want to sell to the people who a) make three or four times as much money and b) have thousands of dollars more left over each month after paying for housing.
I was distracted by my daughter while I typed that, so please excuse the typos. Also, an error because I combined two sentences into one:
A *typical* new-ish house in the area that that price would be about 2,350 square feet. MY house, at that price, is a tad over 3,500 SQ feet for $240K in 2016, but I got a good deal.
I should have known something wasn't right about that 80% number. This percentile chart looks more correct:
https://dqydj.com/household-in...
That puts 30% making over 90K. As you said, we would expect that 50% make over $59K, so ...
I'm not sure now where I got that number. I suspect it might have been an individual income of $90K puts you in the 80th percentile, maybe.
"Get a 200 sq ft one "
Different expectations indeed. It would be rare to find anything smaller than 650sq feet in Texas. In many cities, anything below 200 is ILLEGAL, and there are legal limits on how many can be built under 600 or 650.
My bedroom suite is about 400 square feet. 300 for the bedroom proper, plus the walk in closet and attached bathroom. My four year old daughter's bedroom is about 300. We have two other bedrooms we don't use, plus my office and another room I use for hobbies. I'm not at all rich by American standards.
Which just goes to show again how affluent Americans are compared to most of the world.
Well, AMD designs it and either TSMC or GloFo makes it.
The legal aspects probably are very complicated, but the legal fiction should make concerns about the x86 license not a problem. I think they use the same legal and technical pipeline as for dealing with Microsoft and Sony, iirc they made six semi-custom APUs for them already (original models, Slim/S and Pro/X).
> Next question: how much does it cost to live in Shanghai? Here we go: ¥4,327.53 That's about USD $633 we.
You're using the number for basic living expenses per person other than rent, and that's your cost of living you're comparing to household income? I'm not sure why you are ignoring the $996.52 per bedroom for rent.
We were looking at median household income, so figure 2.5 people. Rent $633-1266, of plus according the page you linked, $1582.50 / month basic living expenses.
About $2300 / month to cover your basic bills doesn't sound like 1/5th of the US cost to me. Again, I pay about that while living in a 3,500 square foot, 4-6 bedroom house in Dallas.
AMD should do with Zen & Vega what IBM did with the PPC 440.
IBM offered the PPC 440 with multiple hard macros [post layout tiles]
that could be selected like a mix&match menu to build a custom CPU chip.
GPU Memory Interface [HBM2/GDDR6/DDR4] /w threads /wo threads /wo threads /wo speculative execution
GPU Digital I/O Interface [DVI-D/HDMI/DisplayPort]
GPU Analog I/O Interface [DVI-I/VGA/TV]
4/8/12/16/24/32/48 Vega CUs
2/4/6/8 Zen+ CPUs
2/4/6/8 Zen+ CPUs
2/4/6/8 Zen- ultra low power CPUs
CPU Memory Interface [HBM2/DDR4]
CPU I/O Interface [Int/DMA/Poled-FIFO]
I/O Bus Interface [PCIe/SATA/spi/i2s/12c/RS232/RS485]
Storage Interface [Parallel/Seroal NAND/NOR Flash]
Infinity Fabric on-chip bus
3-6 port Infinity Fabric on-chip Crossbar Switch
Separate chip for servers
6/12 port Infity Fabric Crossbar Switch
Most/All of the poorer people who live in Shanghai live in
extremely small apartments in government housing projects.
The Government apartments are TINY, think 8x12' for a family of 4, with a shared bathroom [squat toilets] down the hall that is used by 20-30 apartments. Single apartments are 3'x3'x6' literal holes in the wall stacked 2-3 high.
The expensive apartments in Shanghai sell for 500k-5 million Yuan.
Only 2-5% of the population lives in a middle class or better style and less than 1% are what America would consider well off.