| goopy20 said: I think many are focusing on the SSD as that's basically what Sony's build their whole console around and which they believe will be the key to the next generation. It's also something that's a bit harder to grasp than just Tflops numbers and a lot harder to sell to the public. |
That pretty much sums it up. When Cerny made the rounds with developers, he must have heard a lot of "We absolutely need a very fast ssd because a) b) c) ...." so he started with the hardware around a proprietary ssd setup. Also the improved sound hardware (not leaving VR out of sight).
My guess is at the early stages (5-7 years ago), AMD was still struggling with cu scaling (the more cus, the less efficient the eincrease in performance was), so he went fast and small instead of wide and slow.
Pure speculation: My guess is the last change happened very late (after the 12TF announcement). The A0 stepping of the chip in the devunit had the full 40cus running at 2GHz (giving the 10.3TF). This was a safe clock at the cost of losing redundancy, making the chips expensive (simply no redundancy in the biggest die area of the chip). This was changed to 2.23GHz and 36 cus (RDNA2 does seem to have significantly better power usage than RDNA1), making the chips cheaper as there is now redundancy. Could they have gone with 40cus and 2.23GHz for 11.5TF? Maybe, but we'll never know.
