PS4 SLIM ON THE WAY.

[JustBeingReal]

beeje13 said:

Intrinsic said:

beeje13 said:
Is it as simple as swapping in higher density chips? Won't memory bandwidth drop by half if they just did that?

I think they will need to have a wider memory bus, maybe higher clocked ram chips aswell, to get it up to the 176GB/s theoretical max. It could also require a redisigned memory controller, which means a new APU.

I could see them keeping a 500GB hard drive as long as its meaningfully cheaper than a 1TB one. Maybe 2 skus with both options.

Memory bandwidth is controlled by the size of the bus and the clock rate. The bus size isn't changing and the flock rate doesn't have to either so bandwidth isn't going to be affected.

All this means is that instead of having 16 x 512Mb chips in a clamshell config (8 on each side of the board) they could have 8x1GB (4 on each side of the board) which would reduce space taken up by memory on the board by 4 times. 

Anyways, I don't see a slim PS4 being released till 2017. Especially when considering that a slim XB1 will basically bring it down to PS4 size. But when we do have a slim PS4 I expect we will get PS2 level of slimness. 

For that to be true, each new 1GB chip will have to physically have twice as much bandwidth going to itself compared to 512MB chips.

Its the same reason why PC gamers would rather have 2x 4GB sticks of DDR3 than 1x 8GB.

Do you see where I'm coming from? Could require a substantial PCB redesign considering PS4 has 3D/pseudo-stacked RAM (half of the chips on one side of the board, the other half the other side.

The new chips can process up to 32GB/s per chip, 1GB/s per pin (8 Gbps per pin), as the article says 2 chips can process up to 64GB/s, PS4 would have 8 chips, each chip would only need to handle 22GB/s, that's well within the capabilities per chip and it fits perfectly with PS4's 176GB/s.

The chips are perfectly capable of handling the bandwidth load that would be required of them.

 

Like GDDR5 DDR3's bandwidth increases as you add more pins, 2x4GB sticks don't offer more bandwidth than a 8GB stick, provided you're using the same spec per pin and the same amount of pins per chip.

As for the motherboard, a substantial redesign isn't necessary, just a potential increase of bandwidth in the channels used for RAM and no need to etch so many pathways for RAM chips on the motherboard.

TBH this increase in chip density was probably known by Sony already, because they plan out the console's design based on the roadmaps of their tech providers, likely already accounted for potential obvious changes that would need to be made throughout the console's lifecycle, like RAM chip count.