Understanding why Xbox One doesn't need GDDR5 RAM

[ethomaz]

Pemalite said:

Actually there is a latency advantage with DDR3, however it's only about 20% I.E. 10ns for DDR3, 12ns for GDDR5. - Pretty tiny.

The Irony is though, Microsoft went with DDR3 because it's cheaper to manufacture, however the price is going to be increasing here-on-out as the PC transitions over to DDR4.
That's in stark contrast to GDDR5, which isn't used in low-end cards which actually sell in high-volumes, once that happens scale of economies should kick in and prices should drop farther, that is untill the PC transitions over to GDDR6.

I think MS went with DDR3 because they need 8GB RAM and use 32 chips of GDDR5 was out of question one or two years ago... Sony wanted 4GB RAM so 16 chips of GDDR5 was fine.

Both created their project/design with these poins in mind.

PS4: 4GB RAM
Xbone: 8GB RAM

What happened? The industry released dense GDDR5 chips (512MB each) and Sony turned the tables without change one point of the original project/design.

And MS? After one or more year creating a alternative to avoid the low bandwidth of DDR3 (eSRAM on chip, DataMoves, etc) can't spend one more year to change the project to GDDR5 and delay the Xbone for a at least half year... so they maintain the original project/design and all the issues/trouble with it.

Sony had lucky but lucky is in the side o champions too.