According to "Crazy Buttocks on a Train" the rumor was correct, but MS changed that due to the immense backlash.

Cant wait till ps4 gets hacked

Moderated - Kresnik.

It is a really smart choice... MS planed to have 8GB RAM but with the GDDR5 released at the time they will need 32 chips... the cost of the project will be way expensive, the memory controller and PCB a lot complex.

So they have the smart ideia to use DRR3 and compensate the slow speed with cache... eSRAM... the eDRAM is slow to what they wanted.

Now they are just having the issues that every chip maker have with big and complex chips... I can remember the monster GT200 created by nVidia, aka GTX 280, the chip was big and complex and nVidia have a lot of trouble to fix production issues.

Now it is time to MS face these issues.

Everything will end fine... maybe only a low supply at the first months.

The difference in cost between GDDR5 and DDR3 is big but for the project it is not that much... it is like $20 DDR3 to $40 GDDR5.

But how much more damange will that cost them?  Delayed production, possibly a weaker console, low demand can be a loss sale.  What if the console's power gets knocked down below a teraflop which is what this rumour suggests?  The PS4 is going to be noticeably more powerful then.  Sure the eDram would be slower, but it wouldn't be causing these problems and the performance hit would be negligible.  Especially considering the performance hit the console might have now.

The PS4 specs are strong even if MS not droped the teraflops...

But I can't see MS decreasing the clock speed just to make the chip works... they will try to fix the issues and works with a low % of usable chips at the start.

Like I said the issues MS will face are low initial supply and loss money to fix/cover everything... of course that can mean less gamers buying the Xbone... a smaller userbase.

Which is potentially billions in lost money between manufacturing and loss of users.  Plus, what if the Xbox One starts selling poorly and starts loosing third party support like the Wii U?  All cause there was a potential for faster data transfer, potential which is gone now cause the console's power has to take a significant hit.  I honestly don't see how using eSram is a good idea now that any advantage it had is gone and causing huge manufacturing problems.

Yeah... you are right... that can happen but that was the worst case scenario... I think MS can fix the things before the release and just have a few months of bad supply.

And without eSRAM the Xbone should have a bottleneck worst than Wii U in terms of memory bandwidth... the machine should never use all the potential of the GPU only with the DDR3 bandwidth.

We can only hope, but it looks like their solution is to downclock.

The clock rate of the gpu part was never stated by AMD/MS. Here is a theory just as good as any other theory (or probably even a better one):

Knowing they had a weaker gpu by design choice than the PS4, they very likely started with a higher clock to offset fewer compute units. When the higher clock caused problems (not with esram yields, there are no yield problems with large numbers of ram banks, ever, due to inbuilt redundancy) , they downclocked to "normal" 800MHz which gives the 1.2Tflops rumoured around. So this whole "downclock" thingie already happened months ago (at the time the whole "yield problem" gossip started popping up - go figure!)