| Chark said: What is this crazy I'm reading? What does this mean? Any further info, will we find out tomorrow. Maybe we have the wrong idea behind the jaguars we have been expecting. |
The Jaguar is a successor to AMD's Bobcat CPU. It's primarily aimed at tablets and entry-level notebooks. The Quad-Core version of this CPU tops out at 25W in power usage. The "8-core" CPUs inside PS4/720 have been widely rumored to have a custom version of this Jaguar CPU, i.e., 2 of those Quad-Core chips fused together on the same die.
The other alternatives which have been thrown around include a downclocked AMD Bulldozer / Vishera CPU.
What it means in practice is that if Sony/MS want to focus on cutting costs and lower power consumption, they will go with Jaguar AMD APU. If they want to focus on higher end performance in a console, they will go with AMD A8-10 APUs or Bulldozer/Vishera downclocked CPUs. Since the focus on next gen consoles has been hinted at cost cutting of hardware to minimize losses for Sony and MS and increased focus on the graphics / memory sub-system as higher resolution games require exponentially more memory bandwidth, a capital budgeting decision could have been made to sacrifice the CPU performance in exchange for superior GPU performance. This would be a reversal of the strategy behind PS3 but is actually the preferabe method compared to the route PS3 took. If Sony wants to leverage the DirectCompute / Compute shader and GPGPU capabilities of the Graphics Core Next architecture for games, one can see why they might have chosen to go with a 50% more powerful GPU and stick with a rather lower end CPU like the Jaguar 8-core.
Not to worry though as even an 8-core Jaguar should still be an improvement over the Cell / Xbox 360's In-Order CPU architectures.
