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Soleron on 26 January 2013
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Adinnieken said:
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1.6GHz AMD 8-core is the rumour? That's weaker than a 3.3GHz dual-core CPU one might buy for a gaming PC.

You're mistaken if you expect PS4 or 720 to be stronger than an average recent budget-gaming PC.

Mathematically and technically you're wrong.  One, you don't know the throughput and bandwidth of the processors.  But all things being equal, a 1.6GHz octi-core CPU has more processing power than a dual-core 3.3GHz CPU.   if each of the 8 cores did 1.6 GFlops (I know CPU speed and CPU frequency have nothing to do with each other) that would be 12.8GFlops of processing power compared to just 6.6 GFlops.  Likewise, if that 8 - core CPU has 4 hardware threads as opposed to two, you now have essentially the capability of a 32 core CPU compared to a quad core CPU giving programmers the ability to have 32 simultaneous instructions running instead of just four.

You are mistaken if you think frequency is the indicator of CPU speed.  There are several factors that can and will contribute to the performance of a CPU, especially if it's an SOC.




1. We see here that the 8-core FX-8350 running at 4.0GHz has equal gaming performance with the dual-core i3-3225 that is what I would recommend for a reasonably low budget gaming PC. At 1.6GHz the performance is therefore 40% of a desktop dual-core.

2. AMD does not and will not have a faster gaming CPU on the market than the FX-8350 until at least 2014. Therefore the FX-8350 is an upper bound of what's possible in next-gen consoles, and since it's $200 even that is unlikely.

3. AMD does not have multi-threading tech. Even if it did, on current PC CPUs, the second thread adds about 5% to performance and subsequent threads do much less.

You're incorrectly assuming an AMD 'core' and an Intel (PC) 'core' are worth the same amount.