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Soundwave on 03 April 2016
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elektranine said:
JWeinCom said:

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.

The GameCube was an amazing chip that outperformed Ken Kutaragi's ballyhooed PS2 for $100 less. The CELL was a design disaster which got Ken Kutaragi fired.

AMD does most of the work here really, they make GPUs, if Sony/Nintendo were so good at it they would make their own, but they don't and are well advised to not. 

The R&D cost of the chip is not really so much the issue. The R&D cost of SOFTWARE development is more the issue nowadays, sure you can have a 3 TFLOP machine. 4 TFLOP. Fuck. Make it 5 TFLOP. 

The real question is who the hell is going to develop for that and at point does pushing such a chip to its limits basically mean that a developer has to gamble with its future existence? 

The PS4 and XB1 GPUs from my understanding aren't even that different, MS was so butthurt from the RROD on the 360 that they played it probably too safe. It's not like Sony had some magic powder in their chip that only they could create.