| Intrinsic said: There are even 20Gbs versions.... but yh thats not what we will see in these consoles. However there are some things to consider.. Right now 1GB of GDDR5 from 6Gbs -8Gbs all have a bulk pricing (2000 units) of around $6/chip. For 1GB GDDR6 that range from 12Gbs to 14Gbs is between $9 - $11/chip. Now even if soy and MS aredoing "super bulk" orders (literally in the millons) that will only further bring the prices down by say about 20 - 30%. But then there is also the fact that sony/ms won't be using 1GB modules but will be using 2GB modules, which cost more than a single 1GB module but less than two 1GB modules. Basically, if we assume that doing million scale type ordes for 14Gbs 2GB GDDR6 ram means they spend around $12/chip, then 16GB/20GB/24GB will cost them $96/$120/$144 respectively........ just for RAM alone. To put this in context the PS4 RAM budget back in 2013 was around $88. At around $12/2GB chip, this is why it would make more sense adding 4GB of DDR4 ram to 16GB of GDDR6 to have a total of 20GB of RAM. |
I believe 16GB GDDR6 and 4GB DDR4 is feasible. Separate memory pools make sense from a performance point of view as well, since the latency is lower for the DDR4 memory and the bandwidth used by the CPU in a unified memory system nonlinearly reduces the bandwidth available to the GPU. As long as the performance characteristics of the GDDR6 bus is similar to that of the GDDR5 bus of the PS4, there would basically only be pros with seperate memory pools similar to this setup.
Edit: By similar performance characteristics, I ofcourse don't mean similar performance as for the PS4, but the same kind of characteristics i.e. about 10-15% of the GDDR6 bandwidth available to the CPU if the developers chose to access the GDDR6 memory from the CPU.
Also, I think Sony is prepared to take an initial loss on the PS5, something they not were on the PS4, thanks to their much improved financial situation and considering how important the PS business has become to them. I expect them to spend more money on memory for the PS5 than for the PS4.
Last edited by Straffaren666 - on 14 March 2019
