DUST Search - Cost of PS4 vs a PC

Jastaddd Death seeker wrote:

don't forget this part too

"The other big problem is the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which has an utterly insane peak bandwidth of 176 gigabytes per second. There is no way to build a PC with such a configuration. In the PS4, the RAM is used by both the CPU and GPU in a HSA 2.0 configuration, providing a sizable speed boost GÇô an option that isnGÇÖt available to the PC world until Kaveri launches. ItGÇÖs important to note that even if we could slot some GDDR5 RAM into a PC motherboard, it would probably be much more expensive than conventional DDR3."

and

So, there you have it: It is just about possible to build a PS4-comparable PC for $400. You make a lot of concessions, though: We havenGÇÖt included the price of an operating system, nor a keyboard/mouse/gamepad. The DM-387 case is a lot bigger than the PS4. ThereGÇÖs no optical drive, so youGÇÖre forced to load games via USB or digitally download them via Steam. But everyone has an old copy of Windows XP/7 and a spare Xbox 360 or DualShock gamepad kicking around, right?

You can take a benign object, -you can take a cheeseburger and deconstruct it to its source...


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Malkai Inos Onikanabo Brigade Caldari State 1310	Posted - 2014.05.04 21:24:00 - [1] - Quote Switch the APU for a current Kaveri model to couple its Graphics core with the GPU or just go intel when you have a discrete graphics solution. I love the APU concept but using a three generations old processor that is 60%+ GPU in terms of die area while using discrete graphics defeats the whole purpose of the chip, making the severe loss in single thread performance an utter waste. You can take a benign object, -you can take a cheeseburger and deconstruct it to its source...
Malkai Inos Onikanabo Brigade Caldari State 1315	Posted - 2014.05.05 02:35:00 - [2] - Quote Jastaddd Death seeker wrote: don't forget this part too "The other big problem is the 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which has an utterly insane peak bandwidth of 176 gigabytes per second. There is no way to build a PC with such a configuration. In the PS4, the RAM is used by both the CPU and GPU in a HSA 2.0 configuration, providing a sizable speed boost GÇô an option that isnGÇÖt available to the PC world until Kaveri launches. ItGÇÖs important to note that even if we could slot some GDDR5 RAM into a PC motherboard, it would probably be much more expensive than conventional DDR3." and So, there you have it: It is just about possible to build a PS4-comparable PC for $400. You make a lot of concessions, though: We havenGÇÖt included the price of an operating system, nor a keyboard/mouse/gamepad. The DM-387 case is a lot bigger than the PS4. ThereGÇÖs no optical drive, so youGÇÖre forced to load games via USB or digitally download them via Steam. But everyone has an old copy of Windows XP/7 and a spare Xbox 360 or DualShock gamepad kicking around, right? The bandwidth part is useless without a bit of context. The PS4 uses GDDR5 because graphics cards get easily starved for memory, causing performance bottlenecks. Since it uses an AMD APU where the GPU resides on the same die as the CPU using DDR3 ram would severily hamper the GPU part, but not the CPU sections which use integrated caches to circumvet this issue which are much faster than any RAM anyways. Here you can see that increasing the memory clock speed (that usually goes hand in hand with higher bandwidth) does not benefit CPUs too much.Since any dGPU you can purchase will have it's own RAM on PCB, and it will almost always be GDDR outside of the very lowest tier of cards, citing the massive memory bandwidth of the PS4 APU is of little relevance for most CPU+dGPU setups. The "big problem" they talk about isn't really a problem at all. You can take a benign object, -you can take a cheeseburger and deconstruct it to its source...