EXCLU WOLVES SOLDIERS LA X BOX ONE BEAUCOUP PLUS PUISSANTE QUE PREVUE

Xbox chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi has confirmed the Xbox One is now in 'full production' with a last-minute CPU boost.

Speaking at the Citi Global Technology Conference, Mehdi revealed production is on track for a November launch and the console's CPU has been improved from 1.6 GHz to 1.75 GHz. As reported by GeekWire, Mehdi said the upcoming release of the Xbox One will be the biggest Microsoft has undertaken by a "wide margin" in terms of units shipped at launch.

"(The Xbox One) is really going to shine."

The news comes roughly a month after Microsoft confirmed the Xbox One's clock speed has been increased from 800 MHz to 853. A release date for the console is yet to be officially announced.

le CPU a été boosté lui aussi en passant de 1.6GHZ à 1.75GHZ. c un bond de puissance totalement incroyable pour la xbox One et une enorme surprise (mauvaise pour la concurence) So far, so good for the Xbox One.

Xbox chief marketing officer Yusef Mehdi just spoke at the Citi Global Technology Conference and said Microsoft is now in full production for the Xbox One and producing in mass with plans still on for a November 2013 launch.

[Related: Xbox exec: 'We have a more complete value proposition than our competitors']

About one month after improving the GPU clock speed, Mehdi added that Microsoft just made another technical boost by upgrading the CPU performance to 1.75 GHZ from 1.6 GHZ.

Mehdi wouldn’t reveal a launch date — the PlayStation 4 comes out Nov. 15 — but did say that the system is “really going to shine.”

“This will be the biggest launch we’ve ever done by a wide margin in terms of units shipped at launch,” Mehdi said.

Mehdi also had some interesting insights on the Xbox One policy reversals, the $499 price point and how the Xbox business will change with Microsoft’s big re-organization. Stay tuned for more.

So my question is, what do we still not know regarding the Xbox One? The answer is what could possibly be a super fast discrete graphics core stacked inside the main SOC itself. I know it sounds fishy when you first hear about this and the first thing to come up in your mind are, how did anyone not notice this in the first place? or Does AMD or Microsoft have the technology to even manage something like a stacked wafer design? Well, the Xbox architecture hasn’t been in works for just recently but it has been under consideration since some time.

The technology does exist and first appeared in an AMD slide back in 2009. AMD has bet everything on their APU design and if they want to remain competitive on both x86, GPU and Compute sectors than their all-in-one SOCs are their best hope. Back in 2009, AMD revealed a slide that showcased their future potential designs for APUs, the slide starts off with a common PC setup we found these days that includes a discrete GPU and an x86 CPU. Next up is the first APU design which shows the GPU and CPU on a single die, after this we see optimization between both units which include a coherent memory structure and various other improvements which are referring to the Heterogeneous System Architecture which we would see in the next generation of APUs. The last stage is the most critical which involves exploitation of what more could be done and that is only possible through a full fusion of the CPU and GPU knowned as APD (Accelerated Processing Device).

Xbox One APD dGPU

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“APD refers to any cooperating collection of hardware and/or software that performs those functions and computations associated with accelerating graphics processing tasks, data parallel tasks, or nested data parallel tasks in an accelerated manner compared to conventional CPUs, conventional GPUs, software and/or combinations thereof”

According to the information, the APU fused on the Xbox One is using an W2W (wafer 2 wafer) multi-module design that allows stacking of one chip on another. The first layer wafer is dedicated to the 28nm HPM Main SOC which was revealed during Hot Chip 2013 with 8 Jaguar cores and a modified Radeon HD 6670 GPU with DX11.1 and OpenGL 3.0 support. The layer beneath it is dedicated to the stacked discrete GPU and the final wafer layer is dedicated to the 32 MB of ESRAM. In development phase, it was revealed by an insider that Microsoft Xbox One could possibly end up with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory in the stacked design in addition to the 8 GB DDR3 that is available to the system. The other information revealed by him were that the Xbox One would have a power envelope of 300W (90W for Main SOC and 95W for Discrete GPU) but during Wired’s tear down of the Xbox One, the power configuration revealed that Xbox One’s discrete GPU would be getting around 130-150W of power.

Xbox One Power W2W Stack design

So what is this discrete GPU itself? The second wafer is supposedly a 22nm SOI design featuring 2304 to 2560 stream processors as been rumored and based off the VI architecture. VI stands for Volcanic Islands which could be another reason why the discrete GPU has been kept a secret since the new Volcanic Islands based AMD Radeon family would be officially announced during the last week of September in Hawaii. If the Xbox One GPU is possibly based on a Volcanic Islands architecture or even a Southern Islands part with around 2048 cores as the Tahiti die, then this would prove to be a massive powerhouse of graphics performance.

APU + DGPU

As soon as the NDA lifts on Volcanic Islands, we will know if this rumor is true or not, till then all we can do is speculate and wait for some official response. Lastly, there is one more proof mentioned by the source which is a link that redirects back to an Linkedin profile of AMD’s GPU Engineer Vinber Lei, who seems to have worked on Graphics Core IP Design Verification,APU/DGPU Xbox One,Playstation 4. Notice the mention of dGPU again?

Note – This article is based off speculations from various parties, please take it with a grain of salt. Do head over to MisterXMedia for a detailed analysis on the Xbox One dGPU!

C'est bon ça !