Still, perhaps one of the biggest future announcement was carefully hidden on the slide below:
不过，也许AMD最大的一个未来宣布的消息正在被谨慎第隐藏在下面的展示里：
We wondered what the “new semi-custom business in 2H 2016” statement mean. Our baseline was that it’s probably a placeholder for the Nintendo NX console, which should be announced during Tokyo Game Show 2016. However, according to sources in the know, this placeholder has another existing customer, whose name is SONY.
起初作者在AMD的PPT上看到“2016年下半年，新的定制芯片业务”时以为是任天堂的NX（作者推测今年TGS上NX会露面），但作者通过熟悉的消息来源得知，AMD财报上那个“2016年下半年，新的定制芯片业务”就是索尼下的大单。
During a recent interview, Roy Taylor – AMD / RTG’s head executive for Alliances, Content and VR went to defend the decision to only launch mainstream and performance products based on the Polaris architecture. “The reason Polaris is a big deal, is because I believe we will be able to grow that TAM [total addressable market] significantly.”
按摩店的高管Roy Taylor在解释为什么在主流市场和性能级市场只投放北极星显卡时这么说：“我们之所以选中北极星架构，因为这是单大买卖，因为我们相信我们能够显著扩大有效市场份额“。
With Nvidia launching the GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 for the Enthusiast market, and preparing its third Pascal chip – the GP106 – to fight Polaris 10/11, such approach might be a costly mistake. if the Radeon would be the only product family where the Polaris GPU architecture would make an appearance. In the same interview, Roy said something interesting: “We’re going on the record right now to say Polaris will expand the TAM. Full stop.”
现在英伟达面向发烧友市场发布GTX1070和1080，并且准备其第三块PASCAL核心GPU-GP106-以对付AMD的北极星GPU。如果RADEON独占让北极星展现存在感的家用主机市场，英伟达推出的GTX1060可能只会空耗成本。在同一篇采访中，Roy说了一句很有意思的话。“我们现在要说北极星正在创造扩大有效市场的新纪录，完毕”。
At the same time, we managed to learn that SONY ran into a roadblock with their original PlayStation 4 plans. Just like all the previous consoles (PSX to PSOne, PS2, PS3), the plan was to re-do the silicon with a ‘simple’ die shrink, moving its APU and GPU combination from 28nm to 14nm. While this move was ‘easy’ in the past – you pay for the tapeout and NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering), neither Microsoft nor Sony were ready to pay for the cost of moving from a planar transistor (28nm) to a FinFET transistor design (14nm).
索尼的PS4发展计划遇到了障碍。跟旧世代一样，最早的计划就是提升芯片制程，使芯片小型化，然后退出SLIM版主机，看上去似乎很简单。当然改动也很“容易”，重新支付一遍研发费和“出带”费，一个子儿也不能少。最初微软和索尼都捂紧了钱包，谁也不甘心仅仅为了改变芯片制程而被AMD收一笔钱。
This ‘die-shrink’ requires to re-develop the same chip again, with a cost measured in excess of a hundred million dollars (est. $120-220 million). With Sony PlayStation VR retail packaging being a mess of cables and what appears to be a second video processing console, in the spring of 2014 SONY pulled the trigger and informed AMD that they would like to adopt AMD’s upcoming 14nm FinFET product line, based on successor of low-power Puma (16h) CPU and the Polaris GPU processor architecture.
对CPU工艺进行改进就意味着整个芯片都要再研发一遍，AMD光定制费就能朝主机商收上至少一亿美元，实际AMD最少讨到1.2亿，最多讨到2.2亿美元，这还只是定制费。当PSVR设计定型，确定要通过一大捆线缆与PS4相连接而且被定位在“索尼第二台主机”的时候。2014年春天，索尼找上AMD要AMD出改进版方案，索尼的最初要求是要求AMD把研发Puma架构CPU和Polaris GPU时取得的技术进展拿出来，做一个改进版的定制芯片方案。
The only mandate the company received was to keep the hardware changes invisible to the game developers, but that was also changed when Polaris 10 delivered a substantial performance improvement over the original hardware. The new 14nm FinFET APU consists out of eight x86 ‘Zen Lite’ LP cores at 2.1 GHz (they’re not Jaguar cores, as previously rumored) and a Polaris GPU, operating on 15-20% faster clock than the original PS4.
AMD从索尼接到的唯一要求是别让第三方过早知道硬件升级的事情。但当Polaris 10带来巨大性能进步之后，这道禁令也被解除了。 此前泄露的PS NEO的规格中，2,1GHz工作主频是正确的，但是CPU自身并非早前流传的沿用美洲豹架构，而换成了8核“Zen-lite“架构的CPU（译者注：个人猜测是Zen架构CPU的低功耗版本），早前流传的CPU规格中只有主频2.1GHZ是正确的。这颗CPU与下文的定制版北极星组成一套APU。
According to sources in the know, the Polaris for PlayStation Neo is clocked at 911 MHz, up from 800 MHz on the PS4. The number of units should increase from the current 1152. Apparently, we might see a number higher than 1500, and lower than 2560 cores which are physically packed inside the Polaris 10 GPU i.e. Radeon R9 400 Series. Still, the number of units is larger than Polaris 11 (Radeon R7 400 Series), and the memory controller is 256-bit wide, with GDDR5 memory running higher than the current 1.38 GHz QDR. Given the recent developments with 20nm GDDR5 modules, we should see a 1.75 GHz QDR, 7 Gbps clock – resulting in 224 GB/s, almost a 20% boost.
GPU方面，作者得知PS NEO配备的定制版Polaris主频锁在911MHz，流处理器数量高于现有的1152个。最终流处理器数量会超过1500个，但低于桌面版Polaris 10的2560个。总线比现在的1.38Ghz QDR有所提升，内存接口位宽256bit不变，换句话说显存位宽还是256bit。作者结合现在20nm GDDR5单元得到的改进，推断PS NEO用到的显存规格会是1.75GHz QDR 7 Gbps clock ，最终读取速度达到224GB/s，读取速度增长20%。
Internally known as PlayStation Neo, the console should make its debut at the Tokyo Game Show, with availability coming as soon as Holiday Season 2016 – in time for the PlayStation VR headset.
作者打听到的消息是。新主机会在TGS露面。2016年圣诞假期上市，刚好给PSVR助阵。
发表于 2016-5-14 19:53:34
分享
收藏
发表于 2016-5-14 20:48:03
