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AnthonyW86 on 21 June 2013
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Pemalite said:
AnthonyW86 said:

Aah ok i see. Still with high speed DDR4 we should get bandwidth close to that of the Xbox One, and rumours suggest that amd's next high end APU would be 4 core cpu with an IGP of HD7790 level.


Nah. DDR4 won't be much better than high-end DDR3, at-least initially and only in terms of bandwidth.
It certainly won't be cheaper for many years.

I mean, we didn't exactly get DDR3 2400mhz kits on the day the standard was released, it took years for memory speeds to creep that high, the same will hold true for DDR4.

Besides, outside of APU's CPU's generally don't benefit much from faster Ram, compare a Phenom 2 x6 with DDR2 against DDR3, the performance increase is almost non-existent.
Or compare Dual-Channel against Quad Channel on the socket 2011 platform, most real world applications won't see any benefit.

It's the graphics that is memory hungry unfortunatly, Sideport or EDRAM/ESRAM is one way to get around it or AMD could go Quad-Channel on it's APU line, but that would require more PCB layers and traces which would drive up costs substantually on a very cost-sensitive piece of hardware.

Yeah memory bandwidth is important to APU's but that's what you will have to get if you want something that you can compare to a XOne/PS4. Also DDR3 can be pretty fast, they use it on graphics cards like the HD7750 with a peak bandwidth of 72 gbps. But i guess they can't achieve those speeds with bigger memory banks.