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Slimebeast on 07 June 2013
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walsufnir said:
Slimebeast said:
walsufnir said:
Slimebeast said:
This is hilarious.

If it's true like Ethomaz said, that the Xbone APU is more expensive than the PS4 APU and will remain so over the whole generation, and yet the PS4 is 50% more powerful, now that must be seen as a serious engineering failure.

I'm so pissed off. How can they fail so bad?

I want xbone to be able to give PS4 a match, a good fight. Not become laughing stock.

 

It's not the apu, it is the whole chip with APU, memory controller, move units and esram. Of course this is more expensive.

All right, the whole chip.

But it's the same problem - how can something be "of course more expensive" and at the same time weaker than the competition?

What's the benefit of this design decision? That the machine will be able to communicate faster with separate OPs (which makes it fast to switch between different programs, like gaming, Kinect, Skype, TV etc)? That's the only argument I've heard so far.


You are looking at it the wrong way.

$ony and MS started developing their "next-gen" years before, with a goal to achieve, also technically. MS thought it would be a good way to switch to x86 but had good experience with edram in 360 - given that they also have experience in 3d (they build directx) they got specs from amd and together a solution was found to increase bandwidth between apu and ddr3 -> esram. To make it even better (in their view) also Move-units were developped to act as fixed-function-units.

Overall this all adds up - move-units, memory-controller, apu, memory-controller - in one package. It is not "weaker" as you see it. It just integrates more stuff in one package.

What we see here is two different companies with two different ways of implementing a "new gen". After all is said and done it's easy to say "wow, that's crap".

But that's what I feared.

That at the end of the day it will turn out there are no benefits to the Xbone's design over PS4's.

That MS engineers simply made less good choices than the competition, back in the day when the groundworks of next gen console design was made.

That's what I feared and that's what pains me.

If I still was an Xbox fan (and I still am to a degree) I would be banging my head to a wall right now. This would haunt me through the whole coming generation.