| Squilliam said:
Well if they are using one of the two memory stacking technologies then they can have both high performance and more memory. They will either use DDR4 or GDDR5 and I suspect the former rather than the latter. They could go as wide as 512/1024 bits and get extremely good latency and power efficiency if they are willing to take a stab at it. Given the history of consoles using exotic/fast memory buses it wouldn't be unprecedented and quite justifiable as there are many algorythims which are memory bandwidth constrained which could be used to good effect. |
Of course there are many things that could be done, but these usually result in other trade-offs being made. With more exotic memory architectures this usually results in the system being more difficult to develop for. In some cases it may not be that taxing (for example on-chip memory which tends to have a very specific and isolated use) but in other cases it can be problematic. Hypothetically speaking, a system could be built with memory on the GPU for screen buffers and texture caching, have dedicated GDDR5 memory for the GPU, some DDR4 memory for the CPU, and a lot of low performance DDR3 to hold lower priority data could give you the performance and cost you want but it would also be a pain in the ass to manage memory in a system like that.
