Much of the conversation between PlayStation architect Mark Cerny and AMD Senior VP Jack Huynh focused on ‘future GPUs and SOCs.’’
Today, AMD and Sony shared a great number of technical details that will likely be relevant to the hardware and technology of future consoles. The two groups have been working on an endeavor called Project Amethyst, and with it came an update from PlayStation architect Mark Cery and AMD Senior Vice President Jack Huynh. While a PlayStation 6 wasn’t explicitly mentioned during the video, technology for “future GPUs and SOCs” (System on a Chip) imply a lot of interesting advancements coming to the next console generation.
Huynh and Cerny were the hosts of a video discussing AMD and Sony’s Project Amethyst, posted today on the [PlayStation YouTube channel]…
Much of the conversation between PlayStation architect Mark Cerny and AMD Senior VP Jack Huynh focused on ‘future GPUs and SOCs.’’
Today, AMD and Sony shared a great number of technical details that will likely be relevant to the hardware and technology of future consoles. The two groups have been working on an endeavor called Project Amethyst, and with it came an update from PlayStation architect Mark Cery and AMD Senior Vice President Jack Huynh. While a PlayStation 6 wasn’t explicitly mentioned during the video, technology for “future GPUs and SOCs” (System on a Chip) imply a lot of interesting advancements coming to the next console generation.
Huynh and Cerny were the hosts of a video discussing AMD and Sony’s Project Amethyst, posted today on the PlayStation YouTube channel. Much of the video discussed the current bottleneck of bandwidth in data reading and memory usage in current GPU and CPU technology, and how that data is managed and displayed. To that end, three distinct new technologies were revealed: Neural Arrays, Radiance Cores, and Universal Compression.
Some details of each technology based on Cerny and Huynh’s descriptions are as follows:
Neural Arrays: A new system allows compute units to share tasks instead of all working on them separately, and without linking them into one giant unit. The desired result is the compute units will share data and process it together, allowing for greater efficiency, scalability, and processing power on greater workloads.
Radiance Cores: “A new dedicated hardware block designed for unified light transport,” as described by Huynh. This is meant to be an answer to the dead-end Sony’s previous approach to ray tracing had reached. The block is said to handle ray tracing and path tracing in real-time, allowing a theoretically more efficient and streamlined approach to light rendering and shading that should free up the CPU for other tasks.
Universal Compression: A system that evaluates all data that heads towards a GPU or SOC’s memory, and compresses that data wherever possible. By reducing the bytes sent out strictly to essentials, the goal of this system is to vastly free up memory bandwidth usage, and supposedly allowing a GPU to deliver better performance in terms of faster frame rates and higher quality details.
With these technologies going into future hardware between Sony and AMD, it sounds like PlayStation fans have something interesting to look forward to as we continue to trek towards a new console generation. Stay tuned for more news and updates on the PlayStation topic.
Senior News Editor
TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on BlueSky @JohnnyChugs.
From The Chatty
