| captain carot said: Now for bandwidth: It's unlikely that Nintendo will be going with an expensive PCB. But if we take AMD's Tonga, that design is a bit more memory efficient than Pitcairn (PS4 CPU). Then there's that 12GB RAM thing>192 or 384 bit memory interface. The latter one would be 50% wider than PS4's Xbones. So yes, in theory you could go with DDR3. There are some serious questions though. For example: Why that huge amount of RAM? 8GB total would probably be enaugh and well, you could go the Sony way with GDDR5. NEX wouldn't seem that much more powerful but have almost double the free RAM though probably at least risking bandwidth issues. |
12Gb of Ram doesn't mean it needs a 192bit or 384bit bus, it could have 256bit, nVidia used to do such a thing fairly often.
But it does come with some caveats...
12Gb really isn't "huge" either.
The consoles only have 4.5Gb - 5Gb of Ram reserved for gaming duties out of a total of 8Gb.
Let's say 2Gb is used strictly for graphics... That means you only have 2.5Gb - 3Gb of Ram for the game itself, not really much play area in 2016. In comparison the average gaming PC has 8Gb of system Ram, slowly moving over to 16Gb, the OS will only use at-most 2Gb and can free up more memory if things get tight. Then the GPU has it's own 2Gb+ memory pool on top of that, 12Gb of console memory would push the NX closer to the PC in terms of available memory devs can play with.
Still, I would take these rumors with a grain of salt.
There isn't any technical reason why they can't go with that particular memory setup, but it also wouldn't make sense for them to do so... I would hazard a guess it's just a dev kit with more memory for development purposes.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
