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dahuman on 24 January 2013
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BlueFalcon said:
dahuman said:
What I meant is the first gen FX Bulldozers, Piledriver is a little better so I have one coming in today(8350) via UPS with a new mobo to upgrade my personal server with, and Steamroller should be even better. The general concern is that AMD CPUs currently draws a lot more power even at lower clock rates, and if they are using the first gen Bulldozer then it'd really make me want to cry on a power draw/performance ratio and I hope their final product will be the later versions at least so they can get more performance per watt.

1. PS3 had a power draw of 195-240W when it first launched, and its idle power draw was incredibly wasteful:

http://www.gamespot.com/features/green-gaming-playstation-3-6303944/

They could use the FX8300 (95W TDP) and a slightly neutured HD7970M (75-100W), then you can end up very near original PS3's power consumption. I don't think that would be a problem since the idle power consumption will actually be far better this round and load would be similar.

2. They could do a custom BIOS for flexibility. Since most games don't scale beyond 4 threads, they could set up the BIOS so that the 4 cores clock to 3.6-4.0ghz when the other 4 are not in use. If all 8 cores / 4 modules are utilized, the CPU could be capped at 2.6-2.8ghz. Either one of those options (4 Bulldozer/Vishera cores at 3.6ghz+ or 8 of those at 2.6-2.8ghz) would be way faster than 8 Jaguar cores clocked at 1.6ghz. 

My bigger problem with this rumor is not Bulldozer vs. Piledriver details but other things. First, they have 2.2GB of GDDR5 which is not even logically possible unless there is 2048 MB of GDDR5 and some added eDRAM/eSRAM or special cache for the GPU? Second, based on the rumored specs of PS4 vs. 720, it looks like we are comparing a Bulldozer 8 core with HD7970M 2GB GDDR5 (PS4) to an 8-core Jaguar with HD7770Ghz DDR3 (Xbox 720). The difference between those 2 consoles in terms of power is a generational leap apart, at least 2-3x the power difference, especially on the CPU side. How could Sony put so much more powerful hardware and still stay under $600? On these spec differences alone, the consoles would not even be remotely comparable in terms of generational processing power. That doesn't make any sense to me.


I think the price is possible since AMD parts are very reasonably priced, my problem is not with how much power it'd draw, but more on the performance per watt ratio and so I don't like the idea of 1st gen Bulldozer because it'd be wasted performance. 2.2GB of GDDR5 makes no sense at all though, this rumor is kinda meh TBH.