wwenze
Greater Supremacy Member
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2002
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Being an outcast that doesn't belong to either PC gaming masterrace or console peasants, I looked at what the specs the peasants are using,
PS4 has 1152 shaders, 72 TMU and 32 ***, giving it HD7850 performance at 1.8 TFLOPS.
Considering for the last few years there was pretty much no improvement in GPU tech, and the same card got renamed all the way to R9 370, this means the capabilities of an APU isn't too far from a graphics card.
But, AMD limited this to consoles. PC users get the anaemic APU that aren't even worth a look.
Imagine if AMD had a PC APU capable of running GTA V at Very High settings, this would have turned the tide in the fight against Intel, and perhaps not doomed their APU lineout before they even hit the market.
One key point is this combination of high performance GPU with x86 CPU would have made the 28nm power inefficiencies less of an issue. Because for a while, consumers were forced to use 28nm GPU, whether they Intel or not, and this GPU uses way more power than CPUs ever will. A difference of 150W vs 170W system power consumption is easily ignorable when price and form factor advantages are there.
While the benefits are obvious, the barrier to entry is obvious too. The 128-bit (dual channel) system memory bus width will never provide enough speed for a fast GPU (although it might for the XBOne).
But what if we change our thinking. Instead of having a motherboard and CPU with integrated graphics, we can have a graphics card with GPU and integrated CPU. GPU are bigger and badder than CPU, so why let CPU be the boss? Imagine a motherboard with soldered GPU, integrated GPU, onboard VRAM with 256-bit memory bus and additional slots for normal DDR3/4 RAM. Shouldn't cost more to make than a graphics card plus a motherboard.
If there are enough of them on the market, game makers may even have to optimize their games for this level of hardware, just as they do for consoles, making performance less of an issue.
PS4 has 1152 shaders, 72 TMU and 32 ***, giving it HD7850 performance at 1.8 TFLOPS.
Considering for the last few years there was pretty much no improvement in GPU tech, and the same card got renamed all the way to R9 370, this means the capabilities of an APU isn't too far from a graphics card.
But, AMD limited this to consoles. PC users get the anaemic APU that aren't even worth a look.
Imagine if AMD had a PC APU capable of running GTA V at Very High settings, this would have turned the tide in the fight against Intel, and perhaps not doomed their APU lineout before they even hit the market.
One key point is this combination of high performance GPU with x86 CPU would have made the 28nm power inefficiencies less of an issue. Because for a while, consumers were forced to use 28nm GPU, whether they Intel or not, and this GPU uses way more power than CPUs ever will. A difference of 150W vs 170W system power consumption is easily ignorable when price and form factor advantages are there.
While the benefits are obvious, the barrier to entry is obvious too. The 128-bit (dual channel) system memory bus width will never provide enough speed for a fast GPU (although it might for the XBOne).
But what if we change our thinking. Instead of having a motherboard and CPU with integrated graphics, we can have a graphics card with GPU and integrated CPU. GPU are bigger and badder than CPU, so why let CPU be the boss? Imagine a motherboard with soldered GPU, integrated GPU, onboard VRAM with 256-bit memory bus and additional slots for normal DDR3/4 RAM. Shouldn't cost more to make than a graphics card plus a motherboard.
If there are enough of them on the market, game makers may even have to optimize their games for this level of hardware, just as they do for consoles, making performance less of an issue.
