Actually it's slower than a Radeon 7870 Desktop.
The Playstation 4 will have 1152 SPs and 72 texture units, whilst the Radeon 7870 GHz Edition has 1280 SP's and 80 texture units.
But because of the clock speed, it's compute performance is around the level of a Radeon 7850 (1.76 TFLOPS for the 7850, 2.5 TFLOPS for the 7870 and 1.84 TFLOPS for the PS4, making the PS4 closer to the 7850 than the 7870.), but with a little more texturing grunt.
With that said, anyone who has a Radeon 7850 can overclock it and it will end up faster than a 7870 and thus PS4 anyway.

But don't think it's as capable as a 7870, they can't push the clockspeeds high in a console, they have the thermals and power consumption to think of, much like a laptop.

What you say is true, but you also have to remember that desktop GPUs can never show it's true potential because they are hindered by the many layers that are the OS, the drivers, the DirectX/OpenGL libraries, etc. something that doesn't happen on a console GPU where devs can almost code to metal. That's why console GPUs can surpass the performance of their PC's counterparts.

The GPU is not bad yet is not cutting edge either. At the end of the PS4's life, if someone still games on a PC with an HD7870 he'll get results a bit worse than those of the PS4, but if he uses an HD7970 or a GTX680 then he'll get the same graphics, probably better.

This should draw some hilarious aggro.

Pemalite said:

Actually it's probably weaker than what most people think. Adding more cores is never a linear increase in compute power due to the inefficiencies of sharing caches and bandwidth, this is a well known phenomenon when adding more cores to what is generally serialised processing.
Remember, Jaguar has a low transister budget for a cost sensitive device, you can't expect it to compete with any decent Mobile or Desktop processor, 8 cores or not.

Hell, Cell was never anything special either, yet people actually thought it could be used to render detailed high-resolution graphics and was able to compete with super computers in terms of compute performance, it's marketing at it's best, pure and simple.
In the end, it was more or less a hindrance rather than a benefit and the additional compute power claimed by many never really showed any benefit in anything.
Heck even simple web browsing is slow and clunky due to the lack of CPU power. (Something that the Xbox suffers from too.)

As for the PS4 having a mobile GPU, it is partly true.
Jaguar is a *mobile* processor, hence the GPU which is on the same die is hence by it's very nature also mobile.
However with that said, the only *real* difference between a mobile and desktop GPU is the binning process. Mobile GPU's generally can tolerate lower voltages at certain clock speed tiers, Desktops it doesn't matter, they just dial up the voltage and the clock speed and call it a day, very much how overclockers do it, but AMD does it at the BIOS level and even then will still be conservative about the clocks.

In the end, the most important piece of hardware going into the PS4 isn't going to be the processor, it's not the Ram, it's the GPU. - It's what pushes the framerates up, it's what creates the geometry, lighting, texturing, shadowing and all the other amazing bits and pieces and THAT is the part of the APU that will take most of the PS4's cost budget and those transisters aren't cheap.

With that said, the PS4's GPU isn't even cutting edge in terms of performance, Desktop GPU's have been faster at the highest-end for about 4-5 years now, but those who buy such cards also wouldn't be running at only 1920x1080 where it would go to waste. (And if they are, they should be shot!)

About the CPU the actual eigh-core are not used for games because no developer ever needed to optimize games for a lot of core... that will be change in the next years... games will use more core than clock itself.

And game have a lot of parallel work to be optimized.