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Intrinsic on 19 October 2014
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beeje13 said:

The GPGPU during idle time is basically a free boost. It's like a car turbocharger which uses the exhaust gases to increase power.

Does anyone know the X1s capabilities in this area? I know the PS4s 64 compute threads (X1 has 2) really help in this idle time, as you have the full 1.84 Teraflops to use in this idle time.

My expectation: Microsoft didn't really add to the features that you get out of the box with gpgpu, mainly because of their work in other parts of the apu and their cloud focus. They can add more support in an sdk, but I don't think they can add more compute threads with a software change.

The XB1 is also capable of GPU compute. Thought in th e traditional sense of it. The PS4 can do 64 simultaneous GPGPU instructions while the XB1 does 4. This is just due to th efact that more of the PS4s GPU can be used for it. In addition to this the PS4's GPU has HUMA. Which basiacally means that the GPU can read and write directly to system memory and completely bypass the systems L caches. Basically, this is saying that GPGPU compute on the PS4 is an independent task that doesn't take up any CPU cycles.

And yes, MS and sony appraoched their APUs very differently. Its actually funny, sony didnt really add anything to their APU... they just tried to develop what was already on theer as much as possible while MS added ESRAM and data move engines to theirs. The XB1s APU is actually the more expensive of the two.