| bbd90 said: The overall system specs of PS4 are superior to the rumored Xbox720. The GPU is superior slightly (18 CUs compared to 16 CUs) and the RAM is superior (8GB GDDR5 vs 8GB DDR3 + 32MB ESRAM). The CPU is the same. The biggest disparity in performance will be cause by the bandwidth difference because of the GDDR5 being faster than DDR3. Both of these designs are based off of AMD APUs and we know for a fact that these APUs love more bandwidth since both the CPU and GPU part of the core use the same RAM. So the faster the RAM is the better the APU performs as seen in the following link: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/memory-bandwidth-scaling-trinity,3419-4.html Microsoft's console migh be cheaper because of this configuration because it seems like they did this as a cost saving measure. |
The Xbox design will undoubtedly be cheaper to manufacture as DDR3 RAM is very common, and the system design will also likely run cooler and require less power; also lowering manufacturing costs.
The memory article you linked only compares different spec of DDR3. It would be interesting to see a similar comparison of GDDR vs DDR as the design of GDDR lends itself more to GPU streaming applications at the expense of low-latency random access as a CPU prefers. MS undoubtedly considered GDDR for the next xbox as they used a GDDR3 unified design for the 360. I would be interested to see the tradeoff affect of both implementations.
