A PS4 equivalent rig for $500.00?

[torok]

Pemalite said:

Glad you cleared up the point of you not understanding the PCI-E bandwidth problem.

Some datasets aren't terribly bandwidth or latency sensitive, some are, the ones that are reside next to the GPU's GDDR5 Ram, this would range from textures to geometry data for the tessellators to sheer number crunching compute.

Well, the proof is in the pudding in regards to Physics calculations.
If you take the Unreal 4 engine tech demo, the PC was able to have far more partical physics calculations than the Playstation 4, Physics isn't terribly bandwidth sensitive, it can be done completely on a PC's GPU and reside next to the GPU's GDDR5 memory.
Heck Ageia's first Physics card didn't even use PCI-E Express and only had 128Mb of GDDR3 Ram on a 128bit interface which is a testiment to how lean Physics really is on bandwidth requirements.
Asus eventually released a PCI-E variant but that was still only PCI-E 1x 3.0.

The limiting factor with Physics is and has been compute resources, it can be stupidly parallel hence why GPU's are well suited to that sort of processing.

You're talking servers and super computers, that's your problem, consoles and the Desktop PC are far removed from that.
I still stand by that we are far from a memory wall in the PC space, I have yet to encounter such a thing and I have one of the fastest consumer CPU's that money can buy, I saw gains from having my 6 cores/12 threads @ 3.2ghz to 4.8ghz, I saw gains moving from AMD's 6 core Phenom 2 x6 to an AMD FX 8-core 8120 @ 4.8ghz all with the same DRAM speeds.
Granted my Core i7 has Quad-Channel DDR3 that will help somewhat in some scenarios, but even with half the bandwidth the differences were neglible, Intel's Predictors are fantastic.

Plus, next year with Haswell-E we will have DDR4.

Cache helps to solve the bandwidth and latency deficit of having the CPU to grab data from system memory.
L4 cache like in Intels Iris Pro is allot more flexible in that regard as it has 128Mb of the stuff.

As for the 3Gb memory limit, that's partly true, most games are starting to support 64bit now anyway, heck FarCry did back when the Playstation 2 was in it's prime.

I agree with the first part.
But you are completely wrong on the second.

Here it is in bold so that it sinks in...
The Playstation 4 and Xbox One do NOT have 8 cores dedicated to gaming, they reserve a core or two for the OS and other tasks.

A PC can and does offload game rendering and Physics calculations to GPU's, no questions asked, at 4k or greater resolutions with all the settings on max, something the Playstation 4 could never ever hope to possibly achieve.
Here is why: The Playstation 4 doesn't have enough compute resources.

However with that in mind, I am willing to eat my hat if you can get a Playstation 4 to play Battlefield 4 in Eyefinity at 7680x1440 with everything on Ultra and achieve 60fps if you really think it's the be-all and end-all of platforms it certainly could do that right? (Currently it's 900P and High-settings. - GOOD LUCK!)

wn if you felt inclined.
Mantle is coming it will be a game changer.
Whatever nuances that multi-platform developers make for console is going to translate into real gains for AMD's Graphics Core Next GPU's on the PC.

Man, that is a lot of text. Let's go point-by-point:

You are not understading the problems with GPU intensive processing and the problem in the bottleneck. Currently the single massive bottleneck is on passing data from CPU to GPU and all currently uses of GPU calculations are the ones that aren't affected by this problem. As you said "Some datasets aren't terribly bandwidth or latency sensitive, some are". Thats sums up all the point of discussion.

Don't assume to that all massive parallel operations are easy to run on a GPU. Conditional statements or recursive algorithm destroy GPU calculation performance and it's not easy to remove this problems. So we usually deal with more complex algorithms on GPU and still having to worry about distributing your data set is far from a nice experience. That even account for physics, SPH being a good example of problems with CPU-GPU data transfer (http://chihara.naist.jp/people/2003/takasi-a/research/short_paper.pdf, but newer resultas from NVidia are actually looking good now).

Don't believe in the memory wall problem if you prefer, even if it is basically accepted as a fact in all the parallel/masivelly parallel computing community. And that's what we have with 8 or 16 cores. These link: http://storagemojo.com/2008/12/08/many-cores-hit-the-memory-wall/ is pretty great and shows some nice points, even with cases of 16 core processors losing to 8 core ones in operations. There is a paper from John Von Neumann there pointing the problem, and that was in 1945. Is Von Neumann is wrong about it? Not much likely. You point for the use on traditional desktops, where normally the CPU isn't being heavily taxed. And when it is normally the answer is Turbo Boost and that disable cores to rise the clock of others, wich avoids the memory wall problem. I'm talking here about games using all of the cores to do intensive operations and that will hit the bottleneck faster than anything.

HPC is a good source of information about what will happen next. Simply because desktops from now use a similar approach to 80s supercomputers (many cores, PRAM). After that, HPC migrated from that to distributed systems. And that's what's next to regular computing. It's so similar that even GPUs aren't nothing new. NASA's vector computers used in space simulations (and others used in nuclear experiments simulation) are exactly what a GPU is and they existed in the 70s. GPU are just that tech reused for rasterization in the 80s that, by pure luck, were pretty good for graphics calculation because of its nature.

And of course a PS4 can't do "Battlefield 4 in Eyefinity at 7680x1440 with everything on Ultra and achieve 60fps" since it doesn't have the required raw power to rasterize all that pixels. More GPUs? Good luck splitting work between them without passing data. But PS4 will far exceed in physics calculation using both GPU and CPU to workload the task. And even in 1080p, it will look way better. And forgot BF4 now, since it's a unoptimized launch game and probably just a por of the PC version to grab money from people. 

And, last: "There are other alternatives other than Cuda (Only locked to nVidia) and OpenCL. This is the PC, you can make your own if you felt inclined. Mantle is coming it will be a game changer. Whatever nuances that multi-platform developers make for console is going to translate into real gains for AMD's Graphics Core Next GPU's on the PC.

No, there isn't any good and real alternative to CUDA. Even CUDA currently sucks. We don't need more alternatives, we need a unified one that runs well on all GPUs and has good developer tools. All the decent ones are NVidia only. AMD needs to up their game here. About Mantle, it's largely PR talk. Coming from AMD that has a terrible background in software tools it is even worse. All GPUs around here are totally different beasts, it's not easy to optimize code for them. Of course it will bring some improvement, but will be far from a game changer. If it was that easy, NVidia would already have it. In the research world, AMD basically never, I mean never, brings nothing new to the table. NVidia brought a lot of massive techs over the years, CUDA is currently the king in GPU computing and Optics is almost bringing real-time raytracing for us. That last one, is THE game changer for the next decade of graphics processing.