PC vs. Consoles - Cost and power comparison

[Pemalite]

AnthonyW86 said:

tuscaniman99 said:
Why would you put 8GB of GDDR5 shared memory in a PC? That wouldn't even make sense. Building an exact replica of a PS4 would be stupid. Building something that runs the same level of graphics would be a completely different setup.

There are rumors that AMD is going to support both DDR4 and GDDR5 in future PC products. Soon we will be able to build PC's that are almost identical to the Xbox One and PS4 in configuration.

AMD will be useing GDDR5 for a form of Sideport, if you recall AMD had a similar implemention on it's older IGP's found in the Xpress, 780 and 880 chipsets where motherboard manufacturers if they were so-inclined would include 32Mb-256Mb of DDR3 memory on the motherboard just for graphics. (IGP could use Sideport+System memory in tandem for a combined pool.)
Most of the time it wasn't a large performance improvement, latencies were down, but the bandwidth wasn't really better.
GDDR5 version of Sideport should be a massive boost.

Failing that, the other option that AMD could take is to throw a heap of ESRAM/EDRAM at the problem, much like Intel did with the GT3e IGP's.

As for DDR4, Intel is moving to it with Haswell-E so it will probably trickle down to AMD's APU's one day when it's cost competitive with DDR3.

But in general, the PC won't be getting a large pool of GDDR5 memory for the entire system anytime soon.