This all sounds nice and interesting, but I think people should wait and see it actually being used in the real world.

After the Cell fiasco, I am skeptical of how powerful Sony next gen console will be.

Just as an obvious observation, most companies are patenting anything they can today to be protected in case they decide to use a technology in the future ... and, regardless of whether the PS4 uses it or not, this is an obvious use for the future.

Well, to be fair, it doesn't say anywhere that it will be very powerful - just that there are 2 GPUs, one lower and other higher powered, switching according to load - if I understood that patent correctly, it's nowhere mentioned them working together, which would make more sense in my opinion. Off course, this might be just part of the design, not the whole design.

I don't think this patent can hold up personally anyway, this is already done with CPU's in devices such as the HTC One X. I would suggest AMD themselves would refute it given their discrete and APU pairings they're pushing.

In my opinion, this sounds like the PS4 or whatever it is called, might have an APU and a GPU seperate with 2 cores of GPUs on board. One is active for games at all times. If the game is pushing the number 1 core to its limit, the system will turn on core 2 to take some of the weight off it's shoulders.


Or I'm just misunderstanding it.

I am almost certain that Sony will boast about its power, but I hope they have learned their lesson from the PS3.

So A10 based AMD APU with it's Terascale 3 based GPU plus a full GPU based on the GCN architecture. Makes a lot of sense to me. As long as they set up the APIs well it shouldn't be a issue at all, the APU GPU could ether be ignored by big games entirely (only used for non demanding applications and OS) or be uses as a giant SIMD unit for physics etc. 

I think that if developers try to make it, they will.

And having an APU and a GPU and not make use of the GPU side of the APU is like wasting resources. Why would they want to include them if that won't be used most of the time? They could go with a simple CPU and the GPU instead.

Using the APU gpu for multimedia applications means PS4 must have a very requiring OS.

Very interested in the kind of functionalities it will bring.

Doesn't the OneX just use the Tegra3 or Snapdragon chip based on region/model rather than actively switching chips?

And the APU and discrete pairings AMD push are based on GPUs with the same or very similar architecture (effectively using crossfire). This patent seems to describe a way of switching between two very different GPU architectures in the background. I don't think anyone else has really done this.