| JEMC said:
Aren't Sandy Bridge-E CPUs 6 core rather than 8 core? And replacing it for an 8 core FX processor which uses more power, runs hotter and gives less performance even with 2 more cores... it is a bit odd. Sure, it's cheaper, but it's still odd. About the GPU, a Nvidia GTX570 gives about the same performance of an AMD HD7870, which will be on par with an HD8770 Sea islands GPU? I don't know what to think. Yes, it looks very powerful, but also quite expensive. |
There are Sandy Bridge-E chips with 8 cores tho they are technically referred to as "Sandy Bridge-EN" or "Sandy Bridge-EP" they are of the same family that is collectively called Sandy Bridge-E.
I would assume that the CPUs would be very low clock for heat/power reasons. In fact I would guess they are planning to use a varaint of Steamroller posibly even Jaguar cores for final hardware, something low power. They are probably just using underclocked FX CPUs while they wait for the Steamroller derived chips to be finalised.
Highly multithreaded CPUs does seem to be the future with UE4 being designed to scale to dozens of cores. Tho that will cause some issues for some workloads which just aren't suited to parallelisation so it is a risk. I mean most PC games don't even scale to 4 cores well today so it will probably cause a lot of issues in the early days. Which may be why they have decided to go for a x86 CPU so they can ease the transition a bit. They probably went with a AMD CPU thanks to the work with tight intergration of CPU and GPU with unified address space etc that AMD have been pushing for their APUs, I imagine that tech would be very helpfull in a console. That and AMD probably gave them a great licensing deal and having the design of the CPU and GPU under one roof probably helps simplify the overall system design process.
For the GPU it will be interesting to see what Sea Islands performs like, they focused heavily on GPGPU with GCN and at the expense of gaming performance per watt. I think that Sea Islands will focus on optimising power usage and gaming performance.
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