Edit : On topic: I wonder why (according to speculation) they are using 8 cores but only at 1.6ghz? Maybe it'd be too hot for fan cooling to run all 8 @ 3.2ghz +?
It's worse than just the 1.6GHz, too. This is from Rock Paper Shotgun's 'Hard Choices' column, might be something to think about or look into further. The
author does seem to be smarter and more informed when it comes to tech than most.
"First up, CPUs. And they appear to be identical [between the Sony and Microsoft consoles]. Eight cores. 1.6GHz clocks. AMD's Jaguar architecture. Hold that thought, we’ll come back to it.
...
So, what does it all mean? First and foremost, it means both consoles will have properly feeble single-thread CPU performance. OK, Jaguar is somewhat of an unknown quality currently. But it’s the replacement for Bobcat, AMD's low-power, poverty-spec architecture. And even AMD is only claiming an extra 15 per cent instructions per clock with the transition from Bobcat to Jaguar.
If AMD's full-fat FX CPUs offer minimal headroom to spare when it comes to single-thread performance in games, Jaguar will only be worse. And by worse I mean much. Factor in clocks and the result is likely to be well under half the per-core performance of AMD FX. Which in turn is well behind Intel’s nest. Nasty.
Of course, you could argue that’s no biggie. You've got eight cores. Simply spread the load. If it were that simple, an AMD FX eight-core chip would already have the legs on, say, a four-core Intel Core i5. But it isn't. So it doesn't.
Admittedly, these concerns don’t translate directly over to console land. With fixed hardware specs, games devs can make better use of the chips available. No doubt we’ll see better balancing of of CPU and GPU utilisation than is typical on the PC, for instance. And in general, operating system and general platform overheads are lesser on consoles.
But for me, those AMD Jaguar cores are still a worry. Getting the CPU bit of games engines to scale neatly across multiple cores has never been easy. It’s funny, really. You’d think Sony would have learned its lesson from the ridiculous (in gaming terms) Cell processor and its array of futile SPEs. I’d far rather see a plain old Intel quad-core chip – or even something like a quad-core AMD Phenom – than eight Jaguar cores.
The problem, of course, is cost. AMD Jaguar cores are teeny-tiny, so a chip containing eight of them will be cheaper than a traditional quad-core PC processor."
Personally I'm not hugely worried, that the RAM is apparently GDDR5 and there's only a very light OS to run alongside the game means the PS4 won't be comparable to a 1.6GHz octo-core desktop PC, it'll run better than that, and if they had gone for something like a 3.2GHz quad core we'd be looking at
much higher cost for the hardware because, after all, it's not just a question of the price of the chip itself, they have to cool and power (which in turn means more cooling for the PSU alone) the thing in a very small space and have the appropriate chipset in place to support it too. But reading that it's eight cores of AMD Jaguar running at 1.6GHz... It's kind of alarming. Nice to see both consoles are using the same though, that should make it easier to port games between them as they use the same instruction sets.
