PlayStation 5 System Architecture Deep Dive |OT| Secret Agent Cerny

Mass Effect · Mar 25, 2020

c0c0suma said:
PS2 launched a year earlier and had a successful predecessor. Xbox and GameCube all launched late. That's just one of the reason. Another thing is that PS2 can serve as a DVD player while NGC couldn't, Xbox needed to buy a license.

PS3 was a huge loss against Xbox 360. The reason that PS3 eventually caught up was Don Mattrick not PS3 itself.

The performance delta might be "17%". However that's critical to today's customers. That's why both of the big two are trying their best to achieve a high teraflops count. High bandwidth of SSD & clock speed means nothing but higher thermal generation and higher cost. In no graphical scenario that a faster chip can outrun a wider chip, under the same architecture.

That sure is some revisionist history considering the highest sales of the 360 were during the Kinect era -- 6-7 years into its life.

Say what you want about Mattrick's handling of the Xbox One, but he made the last half of the 360's life an even bigger success than the first half.

etta · Mar 25, 2020

Whoever created this needs to send it Sony's way. My God if the dashboard is anything like this, it'd be wonderful

Pottuvoi · Mar 25, 2020

chris 1515 said:
Yes this the equivalent.

From what we heard on PS4, GNM is a good API. I have no doubt they will have something performing very good on PS5.

Yup, it should be nice.

Funnily Mesh Shaders are basically return of Ps2 VU1 like vertex pipeline.
Really exciting to see all the improvements we will see due to it.

vivftp said:
Random and probably silly question. We've seen software RT solutions like that one shown off by Crytek a while back that didn't require dedicated RT hardware to run. Is it possible to use solutions like that alongside the RT hardware solutions? In effect having 2 separate RT solutions working together in the same game? So for example, the hardware RT is dealing with reflections, while the software RT is dealing with shadows... or something like that. I know that's really simplifying things since the software RT of course has to run on hardware, and the hardware RT of course has to use software to work, but in a nutshell I'm asking if multiple RT solutions can be stacked.

I'm 99% certain the answer will be no, or that it's more complicated than that, but at 4AM my mind goes to strange places and figured I'd ask :)

You can.
Question is if it's feasible todo for used time/effort and performance/quality.

EVIL · Mar 25, 2020

I wonder when we will be seeing the teardown cerny mentioned in this video (timestamped)

The Road to PS5

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny provides a deep dive into PS5’s system architecture and how it will shape the future of games.

youtu.be

nib95 · Mar 25, 2020

EVIL said:
I wonder when we will be seeing the teardown cerny mentioned in this video (timestamped)

The Road to PS5

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny provides a deep dive into PS5’s system architecture and how it will shape the future of games.

youtu.be

I hope soon, though I doubt it. One of the things I'm most interested to see is the physical design of the system plus the cooling solution. The high clocks will surely require a really elegant and competent thermal design.

amstradcpc · Mar 25, 2020

About Dictator post downplaying PS5's SSD to change how creating worlds could change:

Andrew Maximov on Twitter

“@Tyler496 @Mugenory21 @SeanReli @wccftechdotcom Oh wow yeah the Digital Foundry guy is quite wrong. Which is quite uncharacteristic as those guys are usually pretty on point”

twitter.com

modiz · Mar 25, 2020

EVIL said:
I wonder when we will be seeing the teardown cerny mentioned in this video (timestamped)

The Road to PS5

PS5 lead system architect Mark Cerny provides a deep dive into PS5’s system architecture and how it will shape the future of games.

youtu.be

A Tear down will only happen after we get to see the actual console, and that is probably not happening anytime soon.

sncvsrtoip · Mar 25, 2020

amstradcpc said:
About Dictator post downplaying PS5's SSD to change how creating worlds could change:

Andrew Maximov on Twitter

“@Tyler496 @Mugenory21 @SeanReli @wccftechdotcom Oh wow yeah the Digital Foundry guy is quite wrong. Which is quite uncharacteristic as those guys are usually pretty on point”

twitter.com

ouch ;d

bcatwilly · Mar 25, 2020

anexanhume said:
We don't know enough about PS5's architecture to say it doesn't have the same underlying hardware capabilities that XSX does for reduced precision integer operations. Even if it does, Sony may choose to not utilize it.

Microsoft clearly has custom silicon for machine learning that they worked with AMD beyond some base 'RDNA2' spec as noted directly from their engineers in the Eurogamer full specs reveal article quotes noted below. Microsoft has been touting AI since the first mention of "next gen consoles" from the E3 state in 2018.

The RDNA 2 architecture used in Series X does not have tensor core equivalents, but Microsoft and AMD have come up with a novel, efficient solution based on the standard shader cores. With over 12 teraflops of FP32 compute, RDNA 2 also allows for double that with FP16 (yes, rapid-packed math is back). However, machine learning workloads often use much lower precision than that, so the RDNA 2 shaders were adapted still further.

"We knew that many inference algorithms need only 8-bit and 4-bit integer positions for weights and the math operations involving those weights comprise the bulk of the performance overhead for those algorithms," says Andrew Goossen. "So we added special hardware support for this specific scenario. The result is that Series X offers 49 TOPS for 8-bit integer operations and 97 TOPS for 4-bit integer operations. Note that the weights are integers, so those are TOPS and not TFLOPs. The net result is that Series X offers unparalleled intelligence for machine learning."

Straffaren666 · Mar 25, 2020

anexanhume said:
The question is whether it got folded into RDNA 2 or it is truly custom. Cerny explained both scenarios, and we know it happened last gen too.

I believe it's actually part of RDNA (1), as dot4/int8 and dot8/int4 are mentioned in the RDNA whitepaper.

Cyborg · Mar 25, 2020

anexanhume & STech I get confused by your avatars. Everytime STech posts something for a brief moment I think it Anex.
I had the same problem with this other dude and Klee.

anexanhume · Mar 25, 2020

bcatwilly said:
Microsoft clearly has custom silicon for machine learning that they worked with AMD beyond some base 'RDNA2' spec as noted directly from their engineers in the Eurogamer full specs reveal article quotes noted below. Microsoft has been touting AI since the first mention of "next gen consoles" from the E3 state in 2018.

See below. I would be careful assuming it's exclusive unless explicitly stated so. Even if they have custom bits on top, the underlying capability could be there in a restricted capacity.

Perhaps they made a change to enhance concurrency?

Straffaren666 said:
I believe it's actually part of RDNA (1), as dot4/int8 and dot8/int4 are mentioned in the RDNA whitepaper.

Cyborg said:
anexanhume & STech I get confused by your avatars. Everytime STech posts something for a brief moment I think it Anex.
I had the same problem with this other dude and Klee.

I no longer recognize myself.

Betamaxbandit · Mar 25, 2020

amstradcpc said:
About Dictator post downplaying PS5's SSD to change how creating worlds could change:

Andrew Maximov on Twitter

“@Tyler496 @Mugenory21 @SeanReli @wccftechdotcom Oh wow yeah the Digital Foundry guy is quite wrong. Which is quite uncharacteristic as those guys are usually pretty on point”

twitter.com

ex art director at naughty dog Andrew Maximov?

gundamkyoukai · Mar 25, 2020

anexanhume said:
I no longer recognize myself.

Funny enough i pick you out much faster now compare to the old one lol.

Deleted member 57361 · Mar 25, 2020

Betamaxbandit said:
ex art director at naughty dog Andrew Maximov?

Yes. What's the problem?

chris 1515 · Mar 25, 2020

Pottuvoi said:
Yup, it should be nice.

Funnily Mesh Shaders are basically return of Ps2 VU1 like vertex pipeline.
Really exciting to see all the improvements we will see due to it.

You can.
Question is if it's feasible todo for used time/effort and performance/quality.

Yes I saw this a few months ago.

Expy · Mar 25, 2020

SolidJaum said:
Yes. What's the problem?

Some people think that any dev that worked for Sony is biased and pro-Sony or something.

chris 1515 · Mar 25, 2020

Expy said:
Some people think that any dev that worked for Sony is biased and pro-Sony or something.

Like the ex Sony dev saying that Xbox has a staggering amount of power compared to PS5. ;)

Expy · Mar 25, 2020

chris 1515 said:
Like the ex Sony dev saying that Xbox has a staggering amount of power compared to PS5. ;)

Oh yea, the Timdog guy. ;)

Domcorleone · Mar 25, 2020

etta said:
Whoever created this needs to send it Sony's way. My God if the dashboard is anything like this, it'd be wonderful

damn i need this to be the PS5 UI

PJV3 · Mar 25, 2020

Expy said:
Some people think that any dev that worked for Sony is biased and pro-Sony or something.

It's getting very boring, usually the gen change can be funny, but because people are splitting hairs it feels like a bunch of angry trainspotters are running amok.

Can't wait for the reveal and some stuff to look at.

Deleted member 57361 · Mar 25, 2020

Expy said:
Some people think that any dev that worked for Sony is biased and pro-Sony or something.

Oh of course. Well, if people want to keep lying to themselves, so be it.

-Le Monde- · Mar 25, 2020

The ssd stuff sounds really promising, so it isn't surprising to see some people downplaying it.

Anyone else expecting the ps5 to have a similar design to the dev kit?

I think it's inevitable. 😛

BitterFig · Mar 25, 2020

Straffaren666 said:
I believe it's actually part of RDNA (1), as dot4/int8 and dot8/int4 are mentioned in the RDNA whitepaper.

Actually the white paper says that only some Navi variants support this (see Fig. 9). Also, in page 14 just below "Some variants of the dual compute unit expose additional mixed-precision dot-product modesin the ALUs, primarily for accelerating machine learning inference.". So it's possible that only XSX supports this. Whether games will use machine learning and whether this customization provides a significant improvement for the type of machine learning used are two other questions.

PJV3 · Mar 25, 2020

-Le Monde- said:
The ssd stuff sounds really promising, so it isn't surprising to see some people downplaying it.

Anyone else expecting the ps5 to have a similar design to the dev kit?

I think it's inevitable. 😛

I'm not sure, I can see the cooling solution possibly requiring two rows of vents and they keep the V shape design. I don't care if the thing is quiet.

nib95 · Mar 25, 2020

-Le Monde- said:
The ssd stuff sounds really promising, so it isn't surprising to see some people downplaying it.

Anyone else expecting the ps5 to have a similar design to the dev kit?

I think it's inevitable. 😛

The dev kit looks horrendous, so I hope not. Compared to how slick all the consoles looked this gen, next gen is potentially looking to be so much less space efficient and stylish.

Deleted member 27315 · Mar 25, 2020

amstradcpc said:
About Dictator post downplaying PS5's SSD to change how creating worlds could change:

Andrew Maximov on Twitter

“@Tyler496 @Mugenory21 @SeanReli @wccftechdotcom Oh wow yeah the Digital Foundry guy is quite wrong. Which is quite uncharacteristic as those guys are usually pretty on point”

twitter.com

When I said I don't trust him before, all resetera was about to kill me.

He doesn't like consoles IMO and more importantly, he analyses console hardware through a pc mentality prism. I don't say he is doing it on purpose.

-Le Monde- · Mar 25, 2020

PJV3 said:
I'm not sure, I can see the cooling solution possibly requiring two rows of vents and they keep the V shape design. I don't care if the thing is quiet.

I'm expecting it to be square-ish, but retaining the v shape.
I've never been one to be bothered by looks of a system. Just hope it's quiet.

nib95 said:
The dev kit looks horrendous, so I hope not. Compared to how slick all the consoles looked this gen, next gen is potentially looking to be so much less space efficient and stylish.

It certainly appears that we won't have the traditional looking systems from previous gens. I'm willing to make the change as long as it means quieter, and longer lasting systems.

anexanhume · Mar 25, 2020

BitterFig said:
Actually the white paper says that only some Navi variants support this (see Fig. 9). Also, in page 14 just below "Some variants of the dual compute unit expose additional mixed-precision dot-product modesin the ALUs, primarily for accelerating machine learning inference.". So it's possible that only XSX supports this. Whether games will use machine learning and whether this customization provides a significant improvement for the type of machine learning used are two other questions.

It's possible they were fortune-telling CDNA.

Sony's patent trail does show some interest in ML, so maybe they optioned it too.

Stoopkid · Mar 25, 2020

amstradcpc said:
About Dictator post downplaying PS5's SSD to change how creating worlds could change:

Andrew Maximov on Twitter

“@Tyler496 @Mugenory21 @SeanReli @wccftechdotcom Oh wow yeah the Digital Foundry guy is quite wrong. Which is quite uncharacteristic as those guys are usually pretty on point”

twitter.com

Has dictator ever said anything positive about PlayStation? I swear it's always something negative.

zombiejames · Mar 25, 2020

Not sure if this is new thread worthy so I'll just post it here:

The PlayStation 5's operating system sounds like it's really going to prioritize speed and efficiency above all else, putting that high-speed SSD to very good use in the process. That's a far cry from the PlayStation 4's current dashboard, which almost instantly slows to a crawl as soon as you boot up a particularly intensive game. That'll hopefully be an annoyance of the past, however, as Kotaku's Jason Schreier has shared one of Sony's pitches to developers as it attempts to turn playing a PS5 game into something "as easy as Netflix".

The news editor said: "I have heard some fascinating things about the PS5's operating system like this - one of the pitches they've been making to developers is "playing a PS5 game should be as easy as Netflix." They want to make players feel like they can load up the game immediately and know exactly how much time a given activity is going to take them." Schreier goes on to state that the Japanese giant wants people to feel more inclined to play games in short bursts rather than waiting until they have a handful of hours spare.

Sony Wants Playing PS5 Games to Be 'as Easy as Netflix'

Load up games immediately

www.pushsquare.com

sncvsrtoip · Mar 25, 2020

LittleBigGamer said:
When I said I don't trust him before, all resetera was about to kill me

relax, it's not about trust or not, Alex had some opinion, not necesserly he must be always right (he is not game developer afaik)

Deleted member 27315 · Mar 25, 2020

sncvsrtoip said:
relax, it's not about trust or not, Alex had some opinion, not necesserly he must be always right (he is not game developer afaik)

I am not saying he must be always right. No one is. Look at my edit.

Midas · Mar 25, 2020

zombiejames said:
Not sure if this is new thread worthy so I'll just post it here:

Sony Wants Playing PS5 Games to Be 'as Easy as Netflix'

Load up games immediately

www.pushsquare.com

Haha. Like vultures, circulating above the posts looking for news.

Loudninja · Mar 25, 2020

zombiejames said:
Not sure if this is new thread worthy so I'll just post it here:

Sony Wants Playing PS5 Games to Be 'as Easy as Netflix'

Load up games immediately

www.pushsquare.com

Already posted,in fact this stuff came from here.

zombiejames · Mar 25, 2020

Loudninja said:
Already posted,in fact this stuff came from here.

Ahh, didn't know. Thanks 👍

Straffaren666 · Mar 25, 2020

BitterFig said:
Actually the white paper says that only some Navi variants support this (see Fig. 9). Also, in page 14 just below "Some variants of the dual compute unit expose additional mixed-precision dot-product modesin the ALUs, primarily for accelerating machine learning inference.". So it's possible that only XSX supports this. Whether games will use machine learning and whether this customization provides a significant improvement for the type of machine learning used are two other questions.

I agree, whether it's been included in the PS5 remains to be seen. It doesn't seem to be truly custom/exclusive to XSX though.

Deleted member 5604 · Mar 25, 2020

LittleBigGamer said:
When I said I don't trust him before, all resetera was about to kill me.

He doesn't like consoles IMO and more importantly, he analyses console hardware through a pc mentality prism. I don't say he is doing it on purpose.

He can't help himself. Talks like he knows the innner ongoings of development and makes conclusive statements when he doesn't have a clue. Should stick to graphical analysis rather than hardware/predicting how devs will be able to use it. I remember him saying something like coding to the metal is really just an API advantage and is overrated (or something like that) and devs don't go down to the register level or something, only to be immediately shot down by an actual dev soon after.

amstradcpc · Mar 25, 2020

FarisR said:
He can't help himself. Talks like he knows the innner ongoings of development and makes conclusive statements when he doesn't have a clue. Should stick to graphical analysis rather than hardware/predicting how devs will be able to use it. I remember him saying something like coding to the metal is really just an API advantage and is overrated (or something like that) and devs don't go down to the register level or something, only to be immediately shot down by an actual dev soon after.

Yed, but his post was made an article in wccftech and that converted in articles everywhere, all saying that Digital Foundry says PS5's SSD wont help making richer open worlds. So, its not like a small comment that has no repercusion. The same thing he made at saying cpu and gpu cant reach max clocks at once.

etta · Mar 25, 2020

Yea one super exciting thing about these fast SSDs is now we can have a lot more beautiful, high resolution artwork on the dashboard which no longer needs to be cached in the memory, it'll just get streamed in instantly as you hover over icons.
This SSD will bring so many quality of life upgrades.

BitterFig · Mar 25, 2020

anexanhume said:
It's possible they were fortune-telling CDNA.

Sony's patent trail does show some interest in ML, so maybe they optioned it too.

Yeah could be. Honestly though I wouldn't worry too much about that. Use of ML in games is still out there, and the ML I could see being useful in games wouldn't require that much resources:
- In the DLSS2.0 thread some are claiming that Control's implementation of DLSS does not even use the tensor cores and still only incurs a modest performance cost. We also know that PS5 at the very least has FP16 operations which should divide this cost by two (apparently it's implemented with FP32 in Control). Moreover, quantizing the weights of a neural net into INT8/4 is not the only way to speed it up. For instance, Google has some other approach that searches a smaller neural net that performs close to the larger one. That's another way to speed things up if necessary.
- Other uses of ML would be complex physics simulation (e.g. fluids). However, the networks here would be much much smaller than what you'll typically see in image processing (e.g. DLSS).
- You might have AI opponents? I don't know, Forza tried it, don't know how it worked out. But here again, the computational cost wouldn't be an issue. Pretty sure such small computations could run on a single thread on CPU and not even max it out.

Hopefully, there are other exciting uses of ML in games. Even if INT4/8 is not exclusive to XSX or that decisive, it's nice that Microsoft is pushing for ML and hopefully it'll lead to something interesting. My dream would be to have NPCs that learn and adapt from the player. But pfiou pretty out there for sure.

Imitation Of Life · Mar 25, 2020

Stoopkid said:
Has dictator ever said anything positive about PlayStation? I swear it's always something negative.

He is clearly not a fan of PlayStation and that's fine as long as he is objective in his analysis of game performance. His speculation as to how things will play out with these consoles and their components is speculation though and he is no where near as qualified to discuss this as devs that are actually making games.

Deleted member 4976 · Mar 25, 2020

Not gonna lie, playing Animal Crossing right now is making me want the PS5 SSD stuff to come out already.

Constant, notable load times are killing me in AC.

nexus · Mar 25, 2020

I really can't wait until we have some more concrete usability info. Like how the console is just going to work and all these specs in practice. I feel like games are only going to look so good to a point. I'd imagine money is a limiting factor on creating assets to a degree. But seeing the UI and all this instant loading and launching of games is definitely more enticing to me at this point. Give us dat full console reveal pls.

Dinjooh · Mar 25, 2020

Primethius said:
Not gonna lie, playing Animal Crossing right now is making me want the PS5 SSD stuff to come out already.

Constant, notable load times are killing me in AC.

I thought about the same. Heck just avoid the loading altogether and make every house interactable in the same scene. That and some global illumination would do wonders. Placing lamps outside and see shadows and light being cast around.

VX1 · Mar 25, 2020

Off topic but interesting:

gundamkyoukai · Mar 25, 2020

FarisR said:
He can't help himself. Talks like he knows the innner ongoings of development and makes conclusive statements when he doesn't have a clue. Should stick to graphical analysis rather than hardware/predicting how devs will be able to use it. I remember him saying something like coding to the metal is really just an API advantage and is overrated (or something like that) and devs don't go down to the register level or something, only to be immediately shot down by an actual dev soon after.

Something like that happen in one of the PS5 tech threads.
Still nothing wrong with being wrong once you willing to learn.

Imitation Of Life · Mar 25, 2020

Do we know if Sony is going sell their own SSDs or will we have to depend solely on 3rd party? We are probably looking at 700 GB or so of usable memory which isn't much.

chris 1515 · Mar 25, 2020

It is time to erase any trace of github

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/data-update

gundamkyoukai · Mar 25, 2020

VX1 said:
Off topic but interesting:

chris 1515 said:
It is time to erase any trace of github

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/data-update

That is interesting and might not end well for the person.

PlayStation 5 System Architecture Deep Dive |OT| Secret Agent Cerny

One Winged Slayer

Senior Concept Artist

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