



One week ago we published a detailed report about Durango, the next-gen Microsoft system. The company has built a powerful system, more than Wii U. Now, we would like to share with you the specs for Orbis, Sony’s alternative machine for the next-gen. After you, gents and ladies.

LIVERPOOL SOC

Custom implementation of AMD Fusion APU Arquitecture (Accelerated Processing Unit)

Provides good performance with low power consumtion

Integrated CPU and GPU

Considerably bigger and more powerful than AMD’s other APUs

CPU:

Orbis contains eight Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz, arranged as two “clusters”

Each cluster contains 4 cores and a shared 2MB L2 cache

256-bit SIMD operations, 128-bit SIMD ALU

SSE up to SSE4, as well as Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)

One hardware thread per core

Decodes, executes and retires at up to two intructions/cycle

Out of order execution

Per-core dedicated L1-I and L1-D cache (32Kb each)

Two pipes per core yield 12,8 GFlops performance

102.4 GFlops for system

GPU:

GPU is based on AMD’s “R10XX” (Southern Islands) architecture

DirectX 11.1+ feature set

Liverpool is an enhanced version of the architecture

18 Compute Units (CUs)

Hardware balanced at 14 CUs

Shared 512 KB of read/write L2 cache

800 Mhz

1.843 Tflops, 922 GigaOps/s

Dual shader engines

18 texture units

8 Render backends

Memory:

4 GB unified system memory, 176 GB/s

3.5 available to games (estimate)

Storage:

– High speed Blu-ray drive

single layer (25 GB) or dual layer (50 GB) discs

Partial constant angular velocity (PCAV)

Outer half of disc 6x (27 MB/s)

Inner half varies, 3.3x to 6x

– Internal mass storage

One SKU at launch: 500 GB HDD

There may also be a Flash drive SKU in the future

Networking:

1 Gb/s Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WIFI, and Bluetooth

Peripherals:

Evolved Dualshock controller

Dual Camera

Move controller

Extra:

Audio Processor (ACP)

Video encode and decode (VCE/UVD) units

Display ScanOut Engine (DCE)

Zlib Decompression Hardware

UPDATE: some people is confused about the GPU, here you have more info about it:

Each CU contains dedicated:

– ALU (32 64-bit operations per cycle)

– Texture Unit

– L1 data cache

– Local data share (LDS)

About 14 + 4 balance:

– 4 additional CUs (410 Gflops) “extra” ALU as resource for compute

– Minor boost if used for rendering

Dual Shader Engines:

– 1.6 billion triangles/s, 1.6 billion vertices/s

18 Texture units

– 56 billion bilinear texture reads/s

– Can utilize full memory bandwith

8 Render backends:

– 32 color ops/cycle

– 128 depth ops/cycle

– Can utilize full memory bandwith

All this info is subject to change in the future by Sony.

So, we have a new technical war between Durango and Orbis. Which one will be better? Discuss. Leave a comment please.

We will give more detailed information about each component in future articles.



