Wii U vs PS4 vs Xbox One FULL SPECS (January 24, 2014)

[sergiodaly]

BlueFalcon said:

sergiodaly said:
question @ALL
if the GPUs on PS4 and nextbox are from AMD... what makes people believe that xbox will have edram or esram and PS4 will not... if wii U uses it, its obvious AMD thinks its a good idea for the GPU and i believe AMD will use it too in Sony machine. Right?

In the Wii U, "there are four 4Gb (512MB) Hynix DDR3-1600 devices surrounding the Wii U's MCM (Multi Chip Module). Memory is shared between the CPU and GPU, and if I'm decoding the DRAM part numbers correctly it looks like these are 16-bit devices giving the Wii U a total of 12.8GB/s of peak memory bandwidth." (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6465/nintendo-wii-u-teardown)

Because MS crippled the memory bandwidth of R500 GPU in Xbox 360 in half and Wii U's GPU's memory bandwidth is also crippled by shared DDR3-1600, instead of dedicated GDDR5, both of those solutions try to mask the memory bandwidth penalty by including eDRAM. If you want to retain the full power of the GPU, you would go with GDDR5 for the GPU and drop the eDRAM. If you want to save costs, you go with cheaper DDR memory and eDRAM. If PS4 uses dedicated GDDR5 for the GPU, it's actually the most optimal approach (which is why no AMD/NV GPUs have eDRAM on the PCB). Despite sounding fancy, the use of eDRAM/eSRAM is actually a cost-savings solution to minimize the performance penalty of foregoing a wider memory bus+GDDR5. The lack of eDRAM on PS4 but the inclusion of GDDR5 would actually be a good thing, not a disadvantage. It would imply the graphics sub-system would not be compromised. If Sony cripples the 256-bit bus of HD7970M in half, then sure eDRAM is possible.

ummm thanks for the info... i now see the reason... my confusion was about a article i read i few years back about eDRAM on Xbox 360 and the "ability" of doing AA with that memory and the processor on what "she" is embedded.

from what i notice the step from eDRAM to eSRAM is a step back from dynamic to static... is cheaper but has a larger die size. don't really know if its slower. the increase in size (from 10 to 32MB) might help alot now that games are going for the 1080p resolution. will have to wait and see.