Forbes: Sony Unlocked 7th core to Settle Internet Debates

[Bryank75]

JustBeingReal said:

Lortsamler said:
On paper it will be aprox 17% more power,but how much of that you can translate to real performance benefit is hard to tell. It all depends how fast the system can feed the CPU,and whether it will be at the expense of the GPU. That depends how fast the cache memory can operate to feed them both. It will no doubt be an improvement,but not 17%.

Well PS4 has modifications to bypass GPU cache and pass CPU commands direcly through the additonal bus, for any GPU Compute, which AMD added to the system's SOC. The amount of Cache in the GPU is allocated correctly based on AMD's design and I'm sure they added what is needed to make the most of the GPU in cache dependant portions of a workload.

How much of a system's performance is used depends entirely on optimization of your code design and that's something that only comes through iteration of it.

The CPU always had the same amount of Cache, unified for all 8 Cores, whether it's used for gaming or OS is immaterial, it's constant regardless of the job type.

In CPU dependent workloads it means that developers have an extra core, so they're less bottlenecked on those tasks, it's about 16.6% more performance in that area, the amount of cache available doesn't change just because this extra core has been made available to games.

Is your pic of the SSM game that we lost?

Great rundown of what it means when they say "Unlocked a core", you seem fairly familiar with VLSI...