[EurogamerDF] Orbis Unmasked: what to expect from the next-gen PlayStation

[disolitude]

drkohler said:

disolitude said:

GDDR5 is based on DDR3 and is essentially DDR3 memory optimized for graphics where they increased the clockspeed at the cost of timings.

In fact, I think that they either made a mistake or this whole article is BS. Maybe they are using GDDR5 for graphics and then DDR3 for rest but I don't see how they would have any benefits from using GDDR5 for everything. More heat, more power usage, higher timings...makes no sense. 

No GDDR5 memory is optimized for "large memory chunk transfers", it can prefetch a lot more memory than conventional memory. This is done because graphics memory usually is addressed as "large chunks of contiguous memory". If you want to diplay 4k pictures, you have a lot of bytes to work on/transfer and you need a design the GDDR5 feature offers. If this (45683th) rumour is to be believed, the PS4 uses unified memory, so the designers have to decide on the memory type that they think is more important - either dram for the CPU (which DDR3 is compeltely sufficient) or dram for the gpu which calls for GDDR5 type memory.

I fully agree with this and I don't have any doubts it will be GDDR5 for GPU. I guess the unified memory theory makes sense but current PS3 has dedicated memory for GPU and CPU so I don't see why this would be an issue. Otherwise latency for GDDR5 in non GPU tasks would be through the roof.

But who knows...those guys are the experts and I'm sure  they can make anything work.