Just a quick question, why are you quoting the CPU performance, instead of the GAMING performance here? Because we all know that Intel CPUs will demolish the Kaveri in CPU bound scenarios but most games are not. On the next 3 pages, there are the game benchmarks, where Kaveri easily outmatches or catches up with High end Intel CPUs which are much more expensive. You seem to have conveniently posted an entirely irrelevant set benchmarks and skip everthing that is relevant!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k/12

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k/13

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k/14

Please next time, when you quote something about gaming consoles, quote the gaming performance and the impact of CPU. And you know what, this is KAVERI, with discrete graphics, way lower than what PS4 has, and without the low-level improvements and driver optimizations etc...

All those benchmarks are using intergrated graphics so they are GPU bound.

As you can see even with a modest GPU even a mid tier I5 with slower RAM matches the A10. Throw a CPU bound game with a high end GPU in the mix and it looks more like this.

Good value for money sure but AMD's APUs don't hang with high end Intel CPUs in games.

I don't disagree with you, as you do have some valid points but it's not so simple to say that consoles hold back the PCs. That depends. In the first few years, they actually don't, but rather developers like it because it makes it easier for them to target a standard hardware and lower common denominator. This generation, the consoles are way ahead of the common PC (not talking about the new 2013-2014 PCs, but the average dating back to 5-10 years!), and they will not be holding the PCs at least for a few years ahead.

But down the road, in about 3-4 years, they start to hold back the PC. It's usually the PC platform itself that holds back the games because of so many different configurations and the old PCs in existence still actively used etc. Last generation, yes the consoles DID HOLD BACK the PCs because they lasted an unpredentedly long period, 7-8 years, so the last 2-3 years were a bit long on the tooth. But why did this happen? It's mostly because of the development costs, both for the game developers / publishers and the platform owners.

However, this generation, I believe it will be quite different simply because all consoles (but wii) now are based on x86 and other PC technologies, with really abundant RAM and everything. From one generation to another, things will simply be scaled up, as in from 1080p to 2160p or 30-60fps to 60-120fps or from 2xAA to 8xAA etc... So PCs will not be held back in that sense, you can simply just get the same game with higher resolution, frame rate, AA, finer detail, which was not possible before.

Also I believe, this generation is really a defining one because of its x86 legacy. Platform owners SHOULD keep it that way, transforming their platforms into supercharged propriety gaming PCs, which are backward compatible with the older games directly transferable. They need to create a scalable PC-like platforms, which will ease up platform cycles a lot, with immensely facilitated development (and programming) periods, and also by creating "network effects" and a "lock-in system" similar to the IOS and Android ecosystems, where your purchases are attached to your account, rather than the machine, and once you buy a game, it must be playable in all future iterations of the platform. So basically a game bought with PS X, must be playable with PS X, PS X+1, PS X+2 and so on, which will create high customer retention and loyalty. Actually the best candidate for this is STEAMBOX.

Aparrently you don't know the difference between a gamer and a fanboy...

Altering the numbers slightly?
If you have a PC with 4Gb of System Ram and 1Gb video card, you are omitting an extra 25% of the systems memory, that's not insignificant, that's just only half as severe as claiming the Playstation 3 only has 256Mb of Ram.
Saving yourself time, made your post factually innacurate in order to skew the results.

Besides, I do agree that Ram wise the consoles have never been this close to the PC, but the rest of the system has also never been so sub-par and behind, there is a *massive* gap.
Ram won't make up for performance deficits, it doesn't do any form of processing, that's something that seems to escape many people in these forums who grab a number and run with it in order to win an argument.

HUMA isn't a solution to sub-par performance due to the lack of hardware resources.
HUMA is also merely a stepping stone for AMD's ultimate eventual goals with it's Fusian initiative.

Bundling two different memory types would have driven up costs.
Consoles are cost sensitive devices, they only have a limited budget to work with.
Sony's gamble simply paid off, they would have ended up with only half the amount of Ram if higher density memory modules didn't get released in time, which was a gamble that Microsoft was obviously not willing to make.

Kaveri doesn't out-perform all of Intel's high-end CPU's.
The high-end being Socket 2011.

The Black bars in the charts are Kaveri. Note how potent the mid-range 3 year old Core i5 2500K is.




Now the take away from this is, when-ever something uses plain-jane sequential CPU cycles, Intel still has a massive lead. (It should also be noted, this only includes the Mid-range quad cores, rather than the high-end Hex cores.)
AMD can beat Intel when something can leverage the GPU to assist in processing, thus by extension an Intel Quad, paired up with a GCN GPU would still put Kaveri to shame.

Fact of the matter is, for decades none of the console manufacturers have ever taken CPU performance seriously and why would they? The average joe only cares about graphics, it's a massive selling point and the consoles are built to match such expectations.
The PC offers a no-compromise gaming solution in terms of fidelity, consoles can't match 1440P, 1600P, 4k or eyefinity if you're willing to pay for it.
I'm afraid these days 720P and 1080P are low-end resolutions that I expect out of a mobile phone, not a powerfull gaming device.

The origional Xbox didn't use a Celeron.
It used a Pentium 3 derived processor, but with half the L2 cache.
If it was a Celeron it would have had half the cache associativity, which would have knocked the CPU performance by a good 10% or so downwards.

As for the clockspeeds, A Pentium 3 Tualatin running at 1.4ghz is faster than the Pentium 4 Williamette, provided it wasn't something bandwidth intensive that gave the Pentium 4's quad-pumped bus an edge.

Back when the origional Xbox was launched I had a Pentium 3 667 at the start of the generation and I was playing most of the Xbox multi-plats without breaking much of a sweat including Halo, eventually I did upgrade to an Athlon Thunderbird however in preperation for games at the time.

Before that I also had a Cyrix PR300+ which was to put simply... One of the worse CPU's of all time, slower than a Pentium 2 300, guess what? In theory it could not only handle DVD's but also Blu-Rays. (Provided you copied the Blu-ray to a Hard Drive first as USB 1.0 probably isn't fast enough to Stream.)
The reason being is that like the origional Xbox, PC's these days have dedicated hardware blocks in the GPU to assist with playback of movies.
For instance, my single-core 1ghz Intel Atom tablet doesn't have a decoder in the GPU block, so I installed a Broadcom Crystal HD chip in the Mini PCI-E slot to perform that action.
1080P Movies wen't from unplayable to perfectly playable, without touching on the CPU usage.

Older computers lacked such functionality, with a couple of exceptions like GPU's from Matrox or the ATI All-in-wonder cards and a few S3 and 3dfx cards that targeted those niche's back then.
Back then GPU's looked like this anmd you can see the dedicated decoder and TV handling part of the card:

You know what, I have no objection to any of that. What you are missing is that

a) Those games are not taking advantage of close to the metal programming, and hampered by the high level access of DirectX and Open GL

b) Consoles can utilize CPUs much more efficiently with much faster CPU calss etc. This doesn't mean they'll magically have more CPU muscle but it means the CPU is less of a bottleneck and needed way less

c) Consoles are designed parallel this time around, and it will be taken advantage of, so the single thread performance is not the case here anymore. There is a reason why 8 cores have been in there.

d) Weak CPUs have always been the case in modern Consoles, and their makers gotta be real idiots to put them there otherwise. Again this doesn't mean that on occasion, they'd benefit from faster CPUs but obviously the added performance is not worth it and better spent aelsewhere.

e) For years, I have hardly ever heard developers complaining about the lack of CPU performance (with the exception of Wii). The main culprit of complaint has always been the amount of memory, which is now handled handsomely.

It's time to surface up and face the realities of the actual life, rather than diving into some unrealistic technicalities which hardly make practical differences.