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globalisateur said:
Scoobes said:

What customizations though? The APUs are based nearly entirely of parts normally found in PC architecture. Based on what's been revealed I only know of 2 customizations on the APUs themselves. On PS4, the increase in ACEs and the number of compute queues each ACE can handle, whilst the X1 has the eSRAM. On both you have a few minor additions (mainly for audio which would normally be handled on the motherboard anyway).

They're as PC-like as you can get.

I completely disagree.

How can you arrive at this conclusion? Why do you ignore the most important stuff? There are more than those 2 customizations. The PS4 APU (and the whole console) is highly customized by Sony:

- Volatile Bit cache for compute/graphics better simultaneous uses.

- Onion bus which can completely bypass GPU caches.

- Unified GDDR5 memory which is a first for a CPU (not obviously for a GPU).

- Low power mode which can just power the ram, nothing else, not even the CPU (nor the GPU obviously). (not sure here, can recent PCs do that?)

 

All those elements to my knowledge had never been done on a APU before. Even the PS4 motherboard glorious sleek design is very far away from a PC motherboard as seen on the PS4 tear down. Not even talking about the small size of the machine nor the ingenious cooling of the machine: obliqued shape for insuring air release, circular "slits" which insure air entrance even if console blocked by stuff, passive cooling of GDDR5 chips on the EM shield (the ones that are at the back of the motherboard!! so much usual on PC!!), advanced active cooling by state of the art Sony centrifugal fan. Finally the PS4 APU is the bigger ever designed.

It is as much customized you can get (nowadays) actually.

In my opinion.

Considering the rest of the architecture (the vast majority), those are fairly minor things that are have been in AMD's pipeline (and probably would be regardless of AMDs work on consoles). As for the low power mode, most laptops have had a sleep mode since before the start of the current gen. This is pretty much the same thing from what I'm aware of.

The APU is based on the latest AMD tech, but it's still based on PC tech.

And the cooling? There are so many different variations on how to cool PCs that whilst the PS4s cooling is clever (not surprising considering Sony are a hardware company), it's not anything revolutionary either. The PS3 cooling was more impressive imo.