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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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The games will obviously be made by Martians, duh.
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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.
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On the XBox one X, the other cores are reserved for DRM, telemetry, updates, telemetry updates, drm updates, security updates, Genuine advantage checking, and Genuine advantage updates.
the 50% more memory is also reserved for same.
it's not like developers can actually use them.
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.
yeah? and the XBOX costs $500. moore's law is over. you pay more you get more.
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.
Developers who want access to the Chinese market, obviously. Don't make the mistake to think that everything has to cater to the US audience. Consoles are particularly informative on this topic, the Japanese market sees tons of titles which for various reasons never reach the western audience.
The Xbonex GPU is faster, but the CPU gets absolutely demolished.
Those wimpy, two instruction per cycle mobile toys that the Xbox one/X use are just no match to a real CPU such as a ryzen.
Seems to me the perfect steam box.
Play games at TV resolution, likely high settings for current gen and medium for a long while to come.
I'd love to have this chip, a beefed GPU slower CPU 2400G with RAM too.
This in an SFF PC is the dream for my usage.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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!
This in an SFF PC is the dream for my usage.
Me too, so long as it comes with a boatload of RAM, say 32GB. And I'd like it as small as possible, and with an external power supply. M.2-only storage is acceptable to minimize size, so long as it's NVMe and not SATA. I need USB2, USB3.1, and modern HDMI, and that'll do me.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Given that this embedded part has 50% more compute units than the RX 560, it would certainly have no trouble with the original Crysis and probably perfectly fine with Crysis 3. With 3/8ths of the compute units of AMD's flagship Vega 64 discrete part it is a highly respectable piece of silicon that would obviate the need for a separate GPU for most gamers if it released to retail, a nice step up from the 2400g.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
He's an Xtroll One X troll. Only half of him will go away and the other half will stay here to annoy you.
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I'm just going to pretend you didn't say that newer Nintendos have a better interface. I bought my son a switch for his birthday and it took an hour or more to sign up and link and create accounts and setup parental controls. It also required two other devices (computer to create nintendo account and phone to run parental control app).
I meant $90,000. I copy and pasted that sentence from one post to the other.
What's most eye opening is the stats on the Xbox One X, it still has more horsepower than all of them.
Nonsense. Xbox One has 12 GCN compute units, this one has 24.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
yeah? and the XBOX costs $500. moore's law is over. you pay more you get more.
Never forget to check the accuracy of claims by random self appointed expert on the internet.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
The Xbonex GPU is faster...
No it isn't.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
That seems excessive for a low/middle end PC.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
That seems excessive for a low/middle end PC.
It might seem so, but I have a middle-end PC right now by modern standards (FX-8350) with 16GB of RAM, and sometimes I wish I had more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's a bit more painful than i initially expected then.
> 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.
Not even, the PS4 smacks the XBone left and right once you drop synthetic benchmarks and check real-world performance.
Most "1080p" games on XBone actually render internally at 720p and get upsampled. PS4 renders 1080p internally almost all the time on the same games.
RAM on the XBox is DDR3. PS4 has GDDR5 which has far more bandwidth. Even if the XBONE has more theoretical TFLOPS, it'll never hit that with that gimped DDR3.
Both systems use a gimped Jaguar CPU running in the 2-sh GHz range in the updated models.
I don't own either system. My gaming rig beats them hands-down at roughly the same price.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
At work I have 16GB, and I'm definitely glad to have it (and it's a fairly low end computer), but usually over 25% being used is web browsing, and 40% or so is often free.
For a Steam box plugged into my TV, I don't foresee any web browsers being open.
Looking at Farcry 5, it wants 8GB (both minimum and recomended), so I don't know if 8 is enough if 1 is going to the GPU.
I really hope the system is available in August (the Windows 10 one, not the console), because I've been wanting to get a SFF with a 2400GE as an HTPC, but I bet this will be better for me, AND less money.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
No you donÃ(TM)t, that CPU is very low end.
There's tons of people out there still using dual- or quad-core systems because they still serve most people's needs. So you call it what you want, and I'll call it what I want. The current AMD CPU may be twice as fast, but this thing is something like eight times as fast as systems people are still using happily. Those are low-end systems. This is mid-range.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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 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.
> 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.