Playstation 4 powered by eight core custom chip from AMD
1 min read
Six years after the launch of the Playstation 3, Sony has started the drawn out process of introducing its successor, the PS4. Already, gaming specialists are criticising the company for its drip feeding of information about the new games console.
Sony only gave broad details of the PS4; what it didn't do was actually show the console or say how much it will cost. It was also sketchy about when the PS4 will be available: restricting itself to using the catch all phrase 'holiday 2013', which can be interpreted as sometime in Q4.
However, we do know the PS4 will be a powerful beast. At its heart is a custom chip with eight Jaguar x86-64 cores, supplied by AMD. In a blog on the AMD website, John Taylor, vice president of global communications and industry marketing, said the PS4 design win is the first based on semi custom AMD accelerated processing units (apu).
He said an apu combines general purpose x86 cpus with a graphics processing unit and other elements, such as memory controllers, video decoders and display outputs. The PS4 chip features AMD's Jaguar cpu cores and AMD Radeon graphics processor with 18 compute units generating 1.84Tflops of processing power.
PS4 will also have 8Gbyte of unified system memory and a data bandwidth of 176Gbit/s.
