Rumour: Playstation 4 GPU is by Intel

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Soleron said:

hduser said:

I'd find it hard to believe.  Intel's not a big player in the GPU market and it's history with it's own graphics core is very spotty.  The only thing that would lend some credence to the rumour is that Sony needs a partner to drive down the cost of the PS4 even though it might take a hit performance wise.  The other reason to use Intel is to hope that Nvidia or ATI can counter with a better offer or chip.

Intel's completely redesigning their GPU. It will be nothing like their integrated graphics. They've put up to 48 modified Pentium cores on a chip, redesigned their FP capability and memory bus, and ended up with a workabel GPU that runs both PC software AND graphics.

To give you an idea of the performance:

"Intel's SIGGRAPH 2008 paper describes simulations of Larrabee's projected performance.^[7] Graphs show how many 1 GHz Larrabee cores are required to maintain 60 FPS at 1600x1200 resolution in several popular games. Roughly 25 cores are required for Gears of War with no antialiasing, 25 cores for F.E.A.R with 4x antialiasing, and 10 cores for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 with 4x antialiasing. It is likely that Larrabee will run faster than 1 GHz, so these numbers are conservative.^[13] Another graph shows that performance on these games scales nearly linearly with the number of cores up to 32 cores. At 48 cores the performance scaling is roughly 90% of linear."

So 48 cores will be enough to run next-gen console games for certain.

 

I must agree more with hduser: a GPU based on modified general purpose Pentium cores and able to run both x86 SW and graphics may look a good idea at a first thought, but thinking again the risk is high that it will result in either a jack of all trades, but not really outstanding at graphics, or a bloated device with horrible performance/power consumption ratio.

I may be wrong, but Intel record in this field is nothing to write home about.