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walsufnir on 22 June 2013
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Shinobi-san said:
walsufnir said:

"Sorry but i just don't agree. The little additions Sony and MS make to their systems are negligible and probably dont add much to the cost. Its not that hard to price these systems with a little bit of knowledge on systems and how they work. But i think what is even more obvious is that the core components of the system are the main costs."

 

Sorry but I don't agree. The consoles are not made the way we build computers. The apus are customized by AMD and MSony, the chip-design is custom, the audio-hardware is completely custom, board-design... Ok, yes, HDD is off-the-shelf but the costs of all this detrmined by the actual hardware and the contracts MSony made with the ones who actually build the hardware. For example, the Xbone chip has 5 bn transistors. How would you measure the costs of such a chip?

 

To the architectures: Sadly MS built a system where it is *not* easy to say how the system-perfomance will be. PS4 is straight-forward but we are talking about system-performance here. This means you have to take into account the move-units, esram, the most probably way powerful audio-chip SHAPE and so on. Freeing the computing units from any audio-stuff frees a lot of ressources, for example. Or what is with the os? How many cores does the os occupy? Or is it done by an arm-chip? These are considerations you have to make to talk about system-performance, beside even more other things.

Do you get the idea? I know that you are not completely wrong and many people think like you but your arguments are not the whole truth - they are only part of it. It is really not that simple :) This doesn't mean that you can't compare the components but the single components don't make alone for system-performance.

no you are missing the point.

At the end of the day these consoles are limited to their theoretical output. They can't do miracles and go beyond that. And yes im making it out to be more simple than what it is, but i assure you these consoles are very simillar. And we absolutely can compare them...and while 50% seems like a lot i dont think its that much. We only really sea difference when you looking at 5x - 10x the power and even then the perceived difference is up to opinion. Not to mention they have the exact same compute units and CPU! In other words every single flop is comparable.

Not to mention they have the exact same compute unit and cpu...with the same linear performance. Everything else really just changes the efficiency. The 5 billion transistors is down to mostly the esram as far as im aware.

I swear to you all the little add-ons sony and MS did are pretty much meaningless. And most of the changes MS did make, unfortunately were not positive changes. These topics have been discussed to death on the beyond 3d forums and other tech forums. And no, not everyone is a Sony fanboy. Its pretty much unanimously agreed that Sony went with the better hardware...i think thats pretty clear now. And yeah when im looking at power im mostly talking about the GPU compute units but why is that?

 The GPU is ~90% of the compute capability in both  machines! Thats how these consoles were built,same with the WiiU btw which was also made by AMD. If you not willing to admit that these consoles are comparable then i wont continue the discussion further because really...these consoles are as similar as consoles will ever be thats for damn sure. If you not willing to compare them based on the theoretical output just because it doesnt suite you then i dont know.

Have you ever wondered why the technical discussion has cmpletely died down in the tech forums? Do you really want us to whip out the diagrams and stuff and go through everything again :O...i dont think anyone is interested in doing that. And goodluck going on any forums and starting a discussion on next gen hardware now that everything is already known.


No, you are missing the point. I know the hardware specs, of course. But again, you don't seem to understand that there is a difference between system-performance and theoretical limits. I told you several points that influence the system-performance and you can't argue with that. I don't know if you are not able or not willing.

I will make it even more clear: Let's take a hypothetical WiiU2 with the same APU the PS4 has. Sadly, the system itself has a very bad audio-chip so the cpu has to do a lot of work for audio-processing. Even more bad, the OS running takes enormous 4 cores to run the OS beside games. This means the remaining 4 cpus need to do the processing of audio and the game-mechanics. On paper, you'd say it's as powerful as the PS4 while *system-performance* is not. You get the idea now? I don't know how to explain easier.

Again: System-performance is not "we put every spec together and that's it".  And don't swear on forums, it's useless here :)

Really, I have to fiddle with big systems every day. Custom hardware, generic hardware, obscure hardware. If we would judge system-performance only by specs we would have bought very much crap. This doesn't mean the ps4 is crap, of course.