Hot Chips: Xbone Silicon (5b transistors, 363mm2, 8GB Flash, 1.31TFlops, 204GB/s peak BW)

[Pemalite]

Stinky said:

Serious_frusting said:

I found some of the design choices in the xbone quite strange, however i am impressed with how they have structured the memory to help compensate for the DDR3 bottleneck. So the 32mb ram will do read and write processes at high speeds. Its just getting the data over to it. DDR3 is not slow, it just cant read+write in a single cycle. Will be interesting to see how this memory can handle multiple variables, or more to the point, how developers are going to handle the different memory pools.

Nintendo should take notes. M$ has improved on their design in every way possible by the looks of this.

Without a doubt, MS evaluated unified GDDR for the xbox one as they pioneered it in the 360, but there's adequate bandwidth and there's overkill. Especially when half of the RAM is going to be allocated to OS functions.

Agreed, it basically all comes down to cost, they would have evaluated the Price/performance of GDDR5 over DDR3+eSram.
Essentially they would be taking advantage of the scale of economies with the DDR3 to lower production costs initially, although later in the generation that advantage will dissapear as the PC shifts over to DDR4. (But the APU will be cheaper to manufacture at that point anyway.)

Sony on the otherhand will pay the early premium of GDDR5 untill AMD and nVidia's partners start using the memory in low-end GPU's and IGP's/APU's, the high-end cards will probably shift over to GDDR6 in the next year or so, but scale of economies should shift in favor of Sony over the long term.

Besides, the Xbox One needs less memory bandwidth than the Playstation 4  to begin with, due to the weaker graphics processor, which is the most memory bandwidth hungry part of a gaming device such as a console or PC, the eSRAM is there to give it that boost it needs.