It's just an AMD chip, nothing special. Sony has very little competetion because their competitors are fairly incompetent most of the time.

All you have to do is make a reasonably decent piece of kit and sit back and wait for your competetion to make stupid mistakes and then you just waltz in to victory.

The APU is from AMD.

The SoC is SONY technology designed by Mark Cerny. The APU is only part of the SoC. Everything else on the SoC has to be well-balanced in order for you to use the best APU and get the most out of it.

It's quite frankly a shitty CPU (same goes for the XBox One) with a downscaled AMD 7870 GPU. Nothing special or even anything terribly hard to "balance".

Sony's own competition just self destructs by making stupid mistakes.

MS and Nintendo are incompetent, if Sony had to face up to an competitor like Apple or Samsung in the console space, I think they'd be in some trouble but fortunately for them they're not in that spot.

Well then maybe they should stop making these stupid mistakes, both have been in the business for at LEAST a DECADE! 

Their failures aren't excuses for Sony's success when they're all too familiar with it and that especially goes for Nintendo ... 

It's quite frankly a shitty CPU (same goes for the XBox One) with a downscaled AMD 7870 GPU. Nothing special or even anything terribly hard to "balance".

Sony's own competition just self destructs by making stupid mistakes.

MS and Nintendo are incompetent, if Sony had to face up to an competitor like Apple or Samsung in the console space, I think they'd be in some trouble but fortunately for them they're not in that spot.

Yes, I understand both the CPUs and GPUs on the Xbone and PS4 are just vanilla AMD parts with very slight customizations and downclocks/upclocks, but the SoCs are entirely custom-designed.

The PS4 architecture is based on a simple large and fast memory pool to cut down on wasted cycles by transferring data to different parts of SoC. In short, the both the CPU and GPU read off the main GDDR5 RAM. This creates a more efficient architecture with saved space, giving SONY more leeway to add more compute units.

The Xbone architecture is based on a large amount of slow memory and a small amount of fast memory to act as a giant cache. The architecture is designed to cut down on the latency issues and wasted cycles caused by swapping data between the 2 memory pools. This wastes silicon space and MS had to settle for a weaker GPU. Despite how many parts MS added to the Xbone SoC (Move Engines and the like), it's still inferior to having just 1 large and fast memory pool where no data has to be moved around.

AMD did not design the SoC. They provided the APU, which is just 1 part of the SoC. The type of APU used and the performance will depend heavily on how well a company designs its SoC.

Nintendo (like Sega before them) is just hamstrung by a bunch of old traditional Japanese men on their board of directors. They don't know what they're doing.

Microsoft is a software OS company, they can make good hardware but it's never been a great strong suit for them (see also: Zune, webTV, Windows Phone, Surface is doing ok I guess but nothing that spectacular).

Yes, I understand both the CPUs and GPUs on the Xbone and PS4 are just vanilla AMD parts with very slight customizations and downclocks/upclocks, but the SoCs are entirely custom-designed.

The PS4 architecture is based on a simple large and fast memory pool to cut down on wasted cycles by transferring data to different parts of SoC. In short, the both the CPU and GPU read off the main GDDR5 RAM. This creates a more efficient architecture with saved space, giving SONY more leeway to add more compute units.

The Xbone architecture is based on a large amount of slow memory and a small amount of fast memory to act as a giant cache. The architecture is designed to cut down on the latency issues and wasted cycles caused by swapping data between the 2 memory pools. This wastes silicon space and MS had to settle for a weaker GPU. Despite how many parts MS added to the Xbone SoC (Move Engines and the like), it's still inferior to having just 1 large and fast memory pool where no data has to be moved around.

AMD did not design the SoC. They provided the APU, which is just 1 part of the SoC. The type of APU used and the performance will depend heavily on how well a company designs its SoC.

You know SoC doesn't stand for System on Console right? It's just an abbreviated term for Systen on Chip, something that is a blanket term for all chips that house all core processing technology to make a "system" work.

An APU and an SoC are one and the same thing. AMD provided the System on Chip for PS4 and for XBox One.

AMD designed the SoC's for both consoles, based on the requirements discussed by both companies with AMD.

An APU is just a CPU and GPU on a single die to create a cost-efficient processor. An SoC can contain an APU.

If AMD designed the SoC, then the PS4 and Xbone would have the same exact specs, or at least similar architectures.