Re:The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
by tehidiot on Saturday December 07, 2019 @06:34PM
(#21733375)
That's what the current console SOCs pretty much are - intergrated CPU/gaming GPU on one die backed by unified GDDR for both CPU/GPU, though 8 weak cores as it was the only viable architecture AMD had at the time for a console type device.
From what I understand this is still different from the Sony approach where you'd have a weaker GPU, but would offload shaders etc to the CPU which could do this due to it's powerful dedicated vector processing units. Of course this had the flaw of GPUs eventually develping shader capabilities etc and making it pointless - and harder to program for if you have to target PC/xBox etc as well.
Re:The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers
by hyperpallium on Saturday December 07, 2019 @07:44PM
(#21733682)
IDK specifically, but generally: parallelism is the way to get more compute despite limited GHz, and something like GPU architecture is a neater fit than general-purpose CPU architecture.
BTW the latest AMD GPU architecture (RDNA) is specific for gaming, in that they get around 40% better framerates for the same raw GFLOPS of their previous architecture (GNC).
From your comment, it seems like Sony tried exactly this but failed. Is there an inherent flaw in such a design or just poor execution?
Edit: the biggest problem I see with such a design is RAM IO, but I would think that could be mitigated. Maybe even eliminate support for DDR, instead embedding 4 or 8 GB in the package.