Sony and Microsoft have come to AMD, and why two different consoles XBOX One and PS4

Many wonder why despite the fact that MS and Sony almost simultaneously came to AMD a proposal to design a console APU AMD Jaguar, eventually got quite different console. The explanation lies in the purpose of which is to put the company.


MS designed the entertainment center. They planned that the console will be a number of services such as TV and the Windows 8 Store to buy applications (with support for gamepad).
To do this they had to, whatever running Windows 8, though a few are cut parallel to the operating system for games. For virtualization of the two axes is the third axis - the dispatcher. All of this stuff could eat up to 3Gb and beyond that the system should be clearly more than 4 GB of shared memory to meet the needs of games.

At the time of designing collect 8GB GDDR it was impossible. It was decided to put 8GB of DDR3.In order to avoid problems with the work of the GPU of the slow by the standards of GPU memory in the chip where the CPU and GPU has been established a kind of cache - 32MB over fast ESRAM memory.This memory chip takes up to about a fifth of the area of ​​the chip. As a result, whatever the size and power consumption of the crystal did not go beyond reasonable limits (a new scandal with the lights did not want the death of MS), MS had a little trim the GPU and lower frequency CPU.


Sony as originally set itself another task - to make a simple in terms of architecture game console.They had 3 axes, they planned to write as usual curve little functional firmware that much memory will not. Accordingly, they believed that 4GB is enough for all.At the time of designing the console to collect 4GB GDD5 was a matter of very real. As a result, no ESRAM not hosted inside the crystal, CPU running at higher than One frequency and GPU pipelines maybe more. In devkitah which gave the developers to 4GB and it stood.

If not for a lucky break, Sony We would probably months, no, years, explained all that 4GB is not enough and it's not the amount and speed.However, quite unexpectedly, apparently shortly before the final approval of specifications before the announcement came on the market modules GDDR5 512MB density, and hence with the same number of modules you can get 8GB! Sony failed to review the contracts with producers and now PS4 8GB. They did not have anything to redesign, just changed the memory modules and all. Announcement Sony in February was a surprise even for developers exclusives that have already cram the game under 4GB.

Thus, at least in terms of iron Sony We put checkmate MS.

Tags: Games News
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