After the Scorpio announcement I think it is using Zen without a doubt. Original rumors pointed to Sony having two CPU's, one would be a slightly modified Jaguar, the other would be a next gen Zen. If they went the Jaguar route they could keep the console arond $399.99, but the system would have thermal limits that could not see it reach 5TFLOPS. On the other hand the Zen would result in a $499.99 price tag, but allow them to hit the full 5.5TFLOPS of the RX480.

At this point it only makes since for Sony to choose the second CPU, and assure they have enough power for 4K/30FPS on all games to match the Scorpio. We know that the 4.2TF set up is right on the edge due to the DF article, so a 5.5TF set up could do it noproblem.

This is the post I was looking for. Thank you, Pemalite.

Wouldn't any game that's pushing the PS4's GPU require 7.4Tflops for 4k?

Anyway I hope it's true, make 60Fps a certified option for console gamers.

You will be disappointed.

No way it will have Zen because of the release date and no it will have Zen because of costs.

I mean, why would Sony even care to compete with Scorpio? They already won this gen, they didn't win because of power of the system, the Playstation brand is wordlwide and not limited to 2 countries, they have the better games, they have the better controller, they even have more games, their online doesn't suck anymore, they now have 2-factor authorization, they have Gran Turismo.

There is no need to compete with a system that will be released a year later.

Whatever they choose to do I am buying a Neo. I just think that sticking with the Jaguar/4.2TF/8GB RAM is not a great choice after the Scorpio announcement. I feel like the Neo should be a premium device that is geared towards A/V enthusiasts and the absolute core gamers. To me it should be Zen/5.5TF/16GB RAM, and push $499.99 - $599.99. 

I don't think they should be looking to sell the Neo in mass numbers, it should be a pure passion project that they are looking to make profit on, and sell at lower quanitities. For people just looking to play games the PS4 2000 at $249.99 is an awesome, deal, and your average COD/GTA/Madden bro has no need for anything but that.

At any rate like I said, I am buying Neo. I need a 4K device to take advantage of my 4K equipment, and PlayStation is the only product I am interested in. So, for better or worse, I am excited about next week, it is definitly going to be fun.

1) What does the CPU have to do with the GPU's floating point performance?

2) 5.5 Teraflops isn't the "full" theoretical ceiling of the RX 480 either.

3) It's not doing 4k.

4) Flops has no correspondance with resolution.

Resolutiuon isn't tied to flops.

You pretty much get what you are given in console land.
Remember your console is a cost-sensitive device, you aren't getting high-end PC levels of performance or super-computing levels of performance.

Zen is a big CPU core. - Jaguar/Puma/Other cat cores are small cores which are well suited to cost-sensitive/low-end devices like a console.

It likely will be a premium device... But that extra budget will likely be eaten up by the GPU and nothing else, remember it still has the same other costs like the Drives remember.

I am afraid you are going to be let down. Neo or Scorpio will not be doing native 4k gaming, they simply do not have the power to do so as the technology currently does not exist that is cheap enough.

You will likely have to deal with a compromised 1440P or 1800P experience but with reconstruction or upscaling for 4k, you will of course still see a benefit over regular 1080P rendering though.

If you wan't the proper 4k gaming experience or better... Then PC is still where it is at and will likely be for the rest of this console generation.

Whatever they do, I am just happy to see both Sony and Microsoft offering upgraded consoles. I have been wanting this since PS3 came out and Ken talked about the scalability of Cell. 

I think that I will get plenty of 4K content, because I don't expect every game to be 4K/60FPS. I know in the console space the devs have the reins and they will deliver the best experience they feel they can, and they will put it out at whatever resolution and frame rate they think delivers that. So, whether they have a RX 480 or 10 RX 480's you can never be sure you will get that golden zone some people want.

Finally, no offense to people that like PC, but I will never be re-entering that market. I just prefer an optimized and streamlined device and OS.

Actually, Zen has very small cores (4.9mm^2 reportedly). That would make a fictional 8core Neo (or even a 6core unit would suffice) feasible inside a Neo SoC. However, all that cache ultimately makes the whole package too big/expensive for a console. Also AMD in its roadmaps for the Zen architecture does not show third party access to the Zen architecture until 2017. The design of the Neo SoC was likely finished in (late?) 2015 so that simply doesn't compute for Zen.

The idea that Sony would have any viable way to change the SoC design "after the Scorpio announcement" is laughable at best. Yes there are tons of rumours (more precisely: fanboy wet dreams) floating around that "Sony has two cpu designs to choose - and after the Scorio announcement blablabla..". Of course Sony had several designs for the cpu. When they started to play with ideas about a Neo. That probably was in 2013/14 when they started seriously thinking about a beefed up PS4. If you are lucky, you can change a key component inside a SoC and you are back where you were after 6-8 months at best.

The next idiotic rumours came up when "4k gaming" was the new buzzword. The Neo is not equipped for 4k gaming. For 4k gaming you do not only need TFlops (Compute Units), you need enough TMUs and ROPs and memory bandwidth. NIVidia's new 10x0 gpu line has 48-64 ROPs (with double raster power), high clock rates and high memory bandwitdh to get into the 4k terrain. The Neo SoC most likely has none of all that. Spicing up the PS4 memory bandwidth to a possible 220GB/s gives you more room for compute usage (good for PSVR use and cpu/gpu sharing of the bus), but by far not enough for "true" 4k gaming.

Why don't people just wait a week or so to see what Sony has to say about the Neo (provided that announcement really opens up the hardware)? Personally I can see a Neo SoC with upclocked Jaguar cores (we know the 14/16nm design was done because of XBox Slim) and a gpu with double the CUs (excellent for gpgpu stuff) and unknown TMU count and same 32 ROPs due to 256 bit memory bus. That would be completely in line with the original 4.2TF rumour.

Going to need to see the evidence for that one... As I highly doubt it's going to be competitive with AMD's small cat cores.

Jaguar for instance was 3.1mm at 28nm per core, Intel's haswell core that Zen should be doing battle against was 14.5mm at 22nm, if AMD chooses TSMC 20nm rebranded 16nm Finfet... Well. You get the idea, i just don't see Zen having a third of the die size as Haswell.
Intel had a 64% reduction when moving from 22nm to 14nm... And Intel scales it's fabrication better than TSMC.

Remember that Zen is pretty wide (Twice as wide as Jaguar) and had to bolster/duplicate large chunks of the pipeline in order to accomidate AMD's version of Hyper Threading, higher associative cache, better branch prediction and pre-fetcher, Micro-Op cache... And everything seems to be power gated which also costs transisters.

Yeah. Zen isn't light on cache, although, AMD will likely do a version without any L3 cache which could drastically reduce the die size, but we still aren't talking Jaguar levels here. :P

I'm well aware and keep trying to tell people this. Haha

Puma+ is also a feasible alternative to Jaguar.

Jaguar is fine and at 14 or 16nm would have decent power consumption.
It doesn't really affect the GPU's Teraflops though as that is always going to be a theoretical ceiling.

It's not overclocking though.

AMD will bin chips depending on how well they operate at a certain given frequency with a certain level of voltage, some chips require more, some require less and that can influence maximum clock rate if you need to hit a certain TDP.

With aggressive binning you can release a chip with a higher clock speed, on the same fabrication and use less energy.

For example... If Sony was more aggressive with the PS4 binning... They could have made the PS4's APU 20% faster and used 20% less power.

It doesn't have the grunt for 4k and 30fps, not with all the settings dialed up anyway, simpler/older and indie games sure.

And do you really only want to play only PS4-levels of graphics and nothing more?

For 4k gaming expectations... You just need to look at Polaris anyway, it's a GPU that is better suited to 1080P and 1440P, no question.

But it really doesn't hold any weight.
Flops are calculated as Clock Rate * 2 * Shader count.

So for instance... If you had two GPU's that had 1 Terafaflop of performance, identical amount of shaders, identical clock speed...
But one GPU had 50% more memory bandwidth, 50% more Render Output Units, 50% more Texture Mapping Units, 50% more geometry engines... Then even though they both have the same identical Teraflop ceiling... One will be substnatually faster, in-some cases by 50%.

And this is why you cannot compare the PS4 GPU against the Neo's "theoretical" hardware, because even if the Neo had the same amount of bandwidth on paper... It actually has substantually more.

Plus, even comparing AMD's GPU's on Teraflops alone tends to be inaccurate at best anyway, there are some parts with more flops, that are actually slower than parts with less flops.

If they can nail it with the Multimedia they could very well indeed be onto a winner, that's for sure.

Microsoft won the multimedia Battle with it's Xbox One Slim console, so it would be fantastic if the Neo was competitive on that front. (The PS4 and Slim certainly aren't.)

Well. We have no idea what actual hardware the Neo is using just yet. For all we know it could be a derivative of Vega.

"As they article writer explained "

Lost all credibility not even 3 words in...