Canon R5 Mark II - speculated in Q2/2023, specs

Bigger wrote:

Tazz93 wrote:

The point on the dual Digic setup I partially agree with you. Personally, I don't expect it to have one, like you mentioned, but for different reasons. In the past, Canon has used dual Digic setups in the 5DS and 5DSr, but I don't think it would be necessary in this application. I just don't see a need to increase the processing. Dual Digic would be an aid to oversampling 60+MP down to the various 8K and 4K resolutions, but that's it. 8K 60 is very likely possible on the current hardware (as on the R5C), if not for the overheating.

And that's the reason for dual processors. Power consumption would vary linearly with clock speed at the same voltage, but the need for increased voltage to get reliable operation at higher clock speed makes it more quadratic. So two digic processors doing the same work at half the clock speed each would only use about half the power, and would spread that power dissipation out over twice as much contact area.

Canon obviously hit the power dissipation wall with the R5, and only made incremental improvement in the R5c. The dual processor arrangement would make the most sense to get added computing power for and/or for 8k120 raw and/or down sampled 8k to allow focus breathing correction.

I understand your point, but still disagree. A dual setup could help with thermals, but that isn't a guarantee. Aside from the additional heat soak in the camera, (basically 2 heaters at 70C instead of 1 at 110C), they would have more head room to do other tasks, so its more likely they would use some of that headroom and keep pushing the processors to a higher duty. Also note, I think the biggest factor in temps come from the speed of the processor (more power is needed with faster clock speeds), so if they were to reap the benefits of lower temps, it would require a significantly slower clock speeds. Theoretically, you could have two cores running at 1Ghz instead of 1 at 2Ghz. That would definitely hurt performance in a number of areas. IMO, they would be better off creating a faster more efficient premium processor.

However, that isn't my biggest contention. Looking at the board layout there simply isn't a ton of room to add a second processor without significantly changing the architecture, layout, and potentially the form factor. Significant changes costs money, which means the consumers pay for it or they strip the camera down.  But ultimately, IMO, it sounds very counter productive to add more expensive hardware to mitigate heat when a properly designed set of heat sinks would do the trick.