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elektranine on 03 April 2016
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JWeinCom said:
elektranine said:

Ah yes the oft repeated yet incorrect theory that Nintendo can just stick off the shelf parts in the NX and be more powerful.

Ask yourself this, why 29 months later can you still not buy an APU more powerful than the PS4's APU?

The PS4's APU is a fully custom chip the result of years of R&D by SCE's engineers and AMD's engineers with billions in R&D costs all fronted by SCE. The PS4 APU cost less than $50 at launch to manufacture yet AMD still has not released a APU coming even remotely close to that APU in terms of power.

Surely AMD would have released that chip on PC had they been legally able to do so. It would had a pretty capable chip to go after PC gamers with and since its cheap to make they could have priced it at $100-$150 and still made a killing. However that never happened and never will happen.

The custom chip that SCE and AMD co-developed is the property of SCE and they have the exclusive rights over it. AMD can't use any knowledge from the development of the PS4 APU in any other projects. They are legally bound by contract and NDA. That's why we still do not know the PS4's CPU clock speed and there are still key technologies implemented in the PS4 APU that are missing from AMD's retail APUs and GPUs. SCE went to AMD and contracted them to provide a reference design and to work with them to heavily customize that tech. 

This is why Nintendo has to pay big bucks to beat the PS4. They have to go to AMD and pay the R&D costs to develop a new better APU, as AMD legally cannot use any knowledge they learned from SCE. Or they have to go with a discreete CPU/GPU combo but that would still be constly and drastically increase the cost of the NX console. The thrid option would be to pick an existing retail APU and customize it to their liking but that would still be less powerful the the PS4 but maybe more than the xbone.

It's a semi custon APU and it's based mainly on existing AMD technology

" In the case of the PS4, we leveraged the building blocks of our 2013 product roadmap – the same technologies you find in the latest AMD APUs powering PCs, ultrathin notebooks and tablets – to create a solution that incorporates our upcoming, low-power AMD "Jaguar" CPU cores with next-generation AMD Radeon™ graphics delivering nearly 2 TFLOPS of compute performance!"

It's just not some magical proprietary hardware. It's a modified AMD APU.  Since it is, according to AMD, based on their existing technology, there doesn't seem to be a reason they couldn't make something similar for Nintendo.

They cannot sell that exact chip, but there are similar ones.  It's based on a mobile chipset, so it would be limited to gaming laptops really.  Even if they could sell the exact same APU, they likely wouldn't.  It was made specifically for consoles.  It is very heavy on the GPU part which becomes a bottleneck when you're running a bunch of different things as you often would on a PC.  It also includes a lot of elements that PC gamers would normally keep seperate.  The advantage of having a merged APU and CPU wouldn't appeal to desktop gamers who could buy more powerful CPU and GPUs seperately.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/454508/amd_opens_up_about_playstation_4_custom_processor/

That is just an arcticle based on a routine email for those on AMD's mailing list. I've already said that SCE went to AMD for a reference design but they took that reference design and used that to create a new custom APU chip orders of magnitude more powerful and supporting new technologies not found even in AMD's current APU chips.

How does the PS4 APU become 1200% (12x) more powerful than even most high end APUs released in 2013?

How is it that even AMD's newest announced APUs (not even released yet) are still outclassed by the PS4 by over 2x?

All this extra power & technologies (such as HSA, hUMA) are not found in AMD's retail lineup because AMD does not own the rights to manufacture them. SCE paid alot of money to license the reference design & then customize it. Nintendo would have to do the same. But they lack SCE's engineering background. SCE created a whole new architecture, the cell. Nintendo has never done anything quite to that magnitude so they would have to rely on AMD which would largely increase the R&D costs. So spending a few hundred million $ in a single year doesn't really support this happening. More likely Nintendo is taking an AMD retail APU increasing things like clock speed, memory, etc and ending up with something about as powerful as the xbone.