For what purpose does a PS4 need 8 weak cores?

[Fjodor2001]

If TDP, die area and price is moot, why not design a console based on an Intel Xeon E7-8890 v3 (18C/2.3 GHz) and an NVidia GeForce GTX 980 GPU?

 

[Erenhardt]

If TDP, die area and price is moot, why not design a console based on an Intel Xeon E7-8890 v3 (18C/2.3 GHz) and an NVidia GeForce GTX 980 GPU?

You do that and I buy whole first shipment - 400$ a piece. Deal?

 

[ClockHound]

All well considered points here...

but there's a bigger personal geek picture to consider.

Both Sony and MSFT are racing to release a game where you attempt to pop the veins in Linus Torvalds' forehead while he rants at you about what a shill you are for trying to pop his veins with 8 weak cores.


:biggrin:

 

[cytg111]

I have wondered this, for example most games today only use 1 or 2 cores at most. Games that claim to need 4 cores actually run better on 2 faster cores, so so much for quad core requirements.

Therefore how exactly are devs planning to use 8 cores for gaming on consoles? is it not a bad design and a total waste of time, money and resources to have put in 8 weak cores in a PS4?

why not just 3 or 4 cores?

Why not let Intel build a Pentium G dual core or an i3 for the PS4? would it not have been better than 8 x 1.6 GHZ AMD cores?
How come AMD managed to beat intel and nvidia when it came to getting the contract for both Microsoft and Sony?

Or why not a fully powered 100% intel PS4 with iris pro? maybe even beefing up iris pro just for the PS4?

So given a couple of recent threads, and all the data in them, allready dealing with this question, and all the fanfest retarded fanboisim that followed, this sure looks alot like trollbait to me.
To the specifics of your questions, noone knows for sure, but I would advice usage of common sense and logic

1. Core count. Problary what the industry wants given a cost benefit situation vs graphics, wattage and price.
2. Why not something else? Problary price. Cost benefit again.
3. Games using 1-2 cores today, is kind of conservative plus is it console ports we are talking about here?

It is worth noting that both Sony and MS came out with ~about the same specs, coincidence, conspiracy or simply because that is how the equation plays out?

 

[Sable]

So given a couple of recent threads, and all the data in them, allready dealing with this question, and all the fanfest retarded fanboisim that followed, this sure looks alot like trollbait to me.

Not at all. There's no way he was going for a reaction from the craycrays. He just has no clue about CPUs, GPUs or anything tech related. That's why his tech savvvy chum is asking his advice on his dead i5

 

[soccerballtux]

Probably because of the ease of porting console games over to the PC arena & the fact that the erstwhile CELL architecture was too complex, I think someone complained about it publicly.

I do agree that CELL was better than any other alternative at that time but it needed further development & don't think IBM was wiling to invest in it further.

what sort of development?

I think the 360's Xenon was much better from a this-is-good-for-a-console perspective.

 

[soccerballtux]

Hello, isn't this a little counter productive?
"Dear Devs,

We made it so you can port your games to other platforms easier and cheaper, thus saving time and money. In return we hope that you continue to support our platform as the leading platform for your development cycles.

Love,
Sony & MSFT"

Just about every game that isn't IP owned by the platform is getting a PC version day of release. There are a handful of people like me who own all three platforms and games that focus on a SP narrative that I would have bought on console because that was my only choice is now going to be bought on PC because, well, it's a better platform.



And it boils back down to cost. Both companies already said it they want to return to profits sooner. Translation - we took the cheapest options. People defending the choices under the reasoning of "we want to fleece you faster" is sort of odd.

I preferred it when as a consumer the company took a huge hit in R&D and sold me things at a loss with the intention of me buying stuff for their platforms because that was the only place I could get them. The library for both consoles right now is absolutely pathetic IF you own a PC.

Take a stroll down memory lane. Gen 7 didn't have this issue, Gen 6 not even close.

you're welcome, that's called oligopoly.

 

[soccerballtux]

Is it? I already gave you the reason why x86 was preferred for this console gen, now as you said there are less console exclusives than previous gens, IMO this is a good thing for everyone involved. The flip side is that there're lesser PC exclusive titles as well & that the games are being developed for a wider (larger) audience, this is certainly their (game developers) need of the hour with mobile gaming gaining a massive foothold in this industry.
Isn't this a bit selfish especially when you look at the price enthusiasts pay for their gaming rigs?

you're right, I'd rather serve the needs of the company I give my money. They have such a big heart!!

 

[Blitzvogel]

what sort of development?

I think the 360's Xenon was much better from a this-is-good-for-a-console perspective.

It's GPU was bleeding edge at the time, and it's CPU, while lacking in general IPC was an SIMD monster that in some ways is comparable to modern OoO x86 CPUs. But you have to remember that it was many devs first experience with multicore and those coming from the PC had a difficult time with the narrow cores.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

The fact that the PS4/XB1 decided on such similar specs for their consoles is no coincidence. Armchair spec-whores are a joke in this thread. As posted in the other thread on the very similar topic:

NES, SNES, Genesis, PS2, Dreamcast, among others had processors less than half the performance of high end off-the-shelf hardware. Guess what? Those had awesome games.

And not just awesome games, but awesome looking games because they were designed specially for the hardware. Developers can extract so much out of a ~25w 8-core CPU that would expose far more powerful CPUs as inferior. See GTA4 on consoles and then PC.

 

[RussianSensation]

As far as console vs PC performance though, they simply don't in practice. In fact, it takes 8x Jaguar cores just to match the slowest i3 even with perfect +99% threading (and only 6-7 of them are usable in games):-

PS4 & XB1 equivalent Consoles (8C Jaguar @ 1.75GHz):-
7Zip - 10,123 (8T)
Cinebench 11.5 - 0.44 1T / 3.5 (8T)
Handbrake - 122fps (8T)
WinRAR - 555 1T / 3633 (8T)
x264 HD 5.0.1 - 7.4fps (8T)

i3-4130 (2C/4T @ 3.4GHz):-
7Zip = 10,166 (4T)
Cinebench 11.5 = 1.48 1T / 3.47 (4T)
Handbrake = 154.1fps (4T)
WinRAR = 1178 1T / 3902 (4T)
x264 HD 5.0.1 = 7.6fps (4T)

And even then for actual gaming, many heavily threaded console games such as Watch Dogs that are locked to 30fps / 720-900p on consoles "Medium" equivalent setting can run at 40-50fps at 1080p on "High" even on the slowest available i3-4130 on PC's. Jaguar cores are literally 1/3rd of the speed of Haswell's. All the threading in the world isn't going to beat 4x large cores since 8x 0.33 = equivalent of 2.66 cores (hence why they're at parity with i3's even with perfect threading) and haven't a hope in hell of being "better than i5 performance" no matter how they're utilized.

Ok, now let me know how much it cost to get an i3 4130+Intel morherboard and NV mobile GPU equivalent with 80% of the performance of 7970M by early-2013 (because you need 3-4 months to manufacture everything and 2-3 months for prior testing)?

You guys realize that Sony pays $100 for an APU that includes a slightly downclocked 7970M with 1152 SP? Go look it up. That is near the top of the mobile stack in performance.

You could literally spend $200-250 in hardware and you might have gotten 25% faster performance than Sony got had they gone i3+NV.

Also, people who say PS3 was impressive. Lol! Sony was losing $300 on BOM alone for years and years, while Sony makes $ on every PS4 sold as soon as a gamer purchases JUST 1 game!! This was confirmed by Sony execs.

Further, during PS3/360 era, dlagship GPUs didn't use 270-280W like 780Ti/290X. Of course it seems now that those consoles were more powerful, but this is misleading. In 2015 we willl have 250W-275W GM200/390X. Such cards didn't exist prior to Fermi. You can no longer have desktop class performance in a console. The max any future console will ever have is the fastest 100-125W mobile equivalent NV/AMD GPU.

Considering how PS4/XB1 have outsold PS360 by 2:1 so far, it's clear their executives were much smarter than 95% of current console bashers on AT.

And using AC Unity as indication that current consoles are maxed out! That's the biggest LOL of the thread. Have you people not seen Infamous SS, Drive Club or 1080p Uncharted 4 footage?

The best looking games on PS3 we're nothing compared to Crysis, and 90% of PS3 games looked identical or worse than Xbox 360. That means using a custom CPU design has also proven to be a
Major fail both from a performance point of view and cost. Partly because MS and Sony lost so much $ on hardware (Sony almost went bankrupt while XB lost $4 billion!) that the last gen lasted so long. With this gen we should see new consoles by 2018-2019, and thankfully no one is going to lose $4 billion+ this round on them. Without consoles, it would be too costly or impossible to make most AAA stand-alone PC games outside BF series, MMOs, Total War games and Blizzard titles. The reason both companies chose X86 is to have backwards compatibility moving forward and having professionals like AMD, NV, Intel worry about R&D and all the risks of CPU/GPU designs. For the next round, Sony/MS can just use faster x86 and more or less an off-the-shelf mobile GPU. Most of the work will be done for them by AMD should they choose to just use modern 2018 designs.

 

[BSim500]

Ok, now let me know how much it cost to get an i3 4130+Intel morherboard and NV mobile GPU equivalent with 80% of the performance of 7970M by early-2013 (because you need 3-4 months to manufacture everything and 2-3 months for prior testing)?

Again - my earlier post was purely in response to the "8 slow Jaguar cores will be faster than an i5 if programmed correctly purely because it's 8 vs 4 cores" comment someone made (which is false even with 100% perfect threading in Synthetic benchmarks) - not the cost or time constraint aspects of next-gen consoles.

 

[Erenhardt]

snip

Good points.
I remember when ps3 released those were bought in bulk for compute farms.
Powerful hardware at half the cost. Subsidized by sony. Never used to play games - never returned a single $ for the loss sony swallowed when selling it.

With the CryptoCurrency rush in 2013 - when consoles were designed, the first thing that went trough Sony's mind was "DO NOT subsidize the hardware for crypto mining community".

Imagine what would have happened if ps4 offered 290X mining performance for $400. Not only you get the whole system for $150 cheaper but also PSU, CPU, mobo, ram etc included. And lest not talk of the resale value of used console vs gpu...

No gamer would be able to buy their ps4 to play games - like it happened with amd cards back in mining craze.

Guess what. Sony wouldn't be able to make up the initial loss on hardware by selling games, because most consoles would run litecoin miner.

 

[sm625]

I dont think people realize how low a price MSFT and Sony are paying per jaguar core. If you assume that 60% of the cost is towards the GPU, and 20% is towards the internal caches, memory controller, and uncore, that leaves only 20% of the cost being towards the actual x86 jaguar cores. And since there is 8 of them, that means roughly $2 per core, certainly no more than $3. There is no other way to buy x86 cores in that sort of price range. Not even atom can compete with that.

 

[RussianSensation]

No sane company would take that kind of loss on each unit sold it's corporate suicide. You are basically talking about the same business model as the consoles but using a PC, and losing much more on each piece of hardware sold.

Sony did with PS3 and it almost bankrupt the company. I guess the arm-chair CEO/CFOs of this thread think it should be repeated again since this business model is sustainable according to them.

Wrong, you want your console to sell well & in fact technological prowess is the last on any profit making corp's list.

Exactly.

"Merrill Lynch has published a note on Sony's PlayStation 3 that prices the parts at an estimated $800*"
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2006/feb/19/merrilllynchp

PS3 sold at $499 and $599, implying a minimum loss of $200-300 per each unit sold just based on BOM.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/08/technology/ps3_pricing/

vs. now

PS4 costs $381 to make
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/11/19/ps4-costs-381-to-make-according-to-hardware-teardown/

What you want is to make a console powerful enough that gamers get a next generation jump, which PS4 easily accomplishes over PS3, and you want the console to be priced reasonably so that it sells in high enough volumes to build up a strong userbase --> then you sell millions of games to make your profits. PS3/360 was a completely broken business model where the sales of games didn't offset the hardware losses for many years (and in MS's case never made a profit on the original Xbox or 360).

"Sony Computer Entertainment of Japan has announced that the PlayStation 4 has sold more than 18.5 million units worldwide since it launched. Sony also announced that there has been 81.8 million games sold worldwide for the PlayStation 4."

Even when PS3 launched, the RSX GPU was already 1 full generation behind as G80 (8800GTX) launched within 2-3 days of it. What made PS3/360 great consoles were their exclusives, not cutting edge graphics or hardware because PC easily trumped both of them. I've always bought a PC for the best graphics and FPS, and considering PS4 packs near HD7970M GPU, despite initial rumours that Xbox 1 and PS4 would have HD6670 style GPU, it's more than enough for the next 5 years until PS5. Just bring on the exclusives because this is where XB1/PS4 are struggling the most right now.

Despite the usual underpowered console hate typically found on a PC forum, the executives of MS and Sony hit it out of the ballpark with price/performance of chosen parts and overall strategy for next gen consoles. MS not so much but they could have if they ditched Kinect to start with and allocated $75 extra towards a faster GPU/GDDR5. Sure I would have liked the consoles to be more powerful but frankly the last 4 years of PS3/360 generation, 90% of PC games were console ports and it's not like the extra power in those consoles actually resulted in some breakthrough graphics. The breakthrough graphics came on the PC games that focused on the PC like Crysis 1, Crysis 3 and Metro 2033/Last Light.

For 3-4 years we've had the hardware on the PC to make a 3rd person action-adventure game as gorgeous as Uncharted 4 but how come no one made it? Ze end. <<< This on a $400 box with GPU ~ HD7850 2GB with 1.6Ghz Jaguar cores when on the PC we had Core i7 2600K @ 4.8Ghz and HD7970 CF / 680 SLI for 3 years now.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Only 4 games sold per PS4? Ouch. No wonder they couldnt afford a better console.

 

[RussianSensation]

Only 4 games sold per PS4? Ouch. No wonder they couldnt afford a better console.

PS4 has been out for only 13 months. It took PS3 23 months to get an attach rate of 5.3 games. The lifetime attach rate for the most successful console of all time was 10.3 games over 10 years.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2010/05/15/ps3_game_attach_rate_closes_in_on_xbox_360_s

Since Sony makes $ after just 1 game is purchased and this means they are making profits in Year 1 of PS4's sales. This is in stark contrast to their misguided PS3 strategy that almost bankrupt the firm. I would much rather have consoles and AAA games than a much smaller PC gaming market if the consoles were to disappear.

You continue to state your opinion on all things consoles in a very negative light but basic research reveals that your knowledge of the console business as a whole is severely lacking to take any of your claims seriously. It's been pretty obvious that you hate consoles even before PS4/XB1 launched and you think PC gaming would be better off without consoles. Even now you continue to bash them despite these 2 consoles off to the strongest console sales launch of all time. Since you will never own a console, why do you care, to stroke your PC master race ego?

 

[ShintaiDK]

PS4 has been out for only 13 months. It took PS3 23 months to get an attach rate of 5.3 games. The lifetime attach rate for the most successful console of all time was 10.3 games over 10 years.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2010/05/15/ps3_game_attach_rate_closes_in_on_xbox_360_s

Since Sony makes $ after just 1 game is purchased and this means they are making profits in Year 1 of PS4's sales. This is in stark contrast to their misguided PS3 strategy that almost bankrupt the firm. I would much rather have consoles and AAA games than a much smaller PC gaming market if the consoles were to disappear.

You continue to state your opinion on all things consoles in a very negative light but basic research reveals that your knowledge of the console business as a whole is severely lacking to take any of your claims seriously. It's been pretty obvious that you hate consoles even before PS4/XB1 launched and you think PC gaming would be better off without consoles. Even now you continue to bash them despite these 2 consoles off to the strongest console sales launch of all time. Since you will never own a console, why do you care, to stroke your PC master race ego?

How do you conclude that? How me the math.

 

[RussianSensation]

I think the 360's Xenon was much better from a this-is-good-for-a-console perspective.

Nope. Another myth of last gen consoles. Their CPUs were slow for games and underpowered on Day 1. Even a Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.6Ghz was faster than either CPU in PS3/XB360.

The entire Xbox 360 CPU was not even as fast as a single core in the Core i7 920, a CPU from 2008.


Digital Foundry: How would you characterise the combination of Xenos and Xenon compared to the traditional x86/GPU combo on PC? Surely on the face of it, Xbox 360 is lacking a lot of power compared to today's entry-level "enthusiast" PC hardware?

Oles Shishkovstov (Metro 2033 developer): You can calculate it like this: each 360 CPU core is approximately a quarter of the same-frequency Nehalem (i7) core. Add in approximately 1.5 times better performance because of the second, shared thread for 360 and around 1.3 times for Nehalem, multiply by three cores and you get around 70 to 85 per cent of a single modern CPU core on generic (but multi-threaded) code."

^ That's pathetic -- the entire Xbox 360 CPU was only as powerful as a single core i7 Nehalem at 1.86-2.26Ghz. Like I said a Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.4Ghz would have mopped the floor with it in games.

But people like to talk about how the GPUs in PS3/360 were more future-proof. This isn't true since the rate of GPU progress at the time was much faster than it is now.

"The 360 GPU is a different beast. Compared to today's high-end hardware it is 5-10 times slower depending on what you do"
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-interview-metro-2033?page=4

^ Just 4 years after PS3 launched, we had GPUs 10-11X more powerful.

PS3 ~ 7800GT, but for I'll even give it 7900GT ~ 16.1 VP
November 2010, 4 years after PS3 launched --> GTX580 ~ 180 VP
-----
GTX580 was 11X more powerful than RSX in PS3 in just 4 years after PS3's launch.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2298406


The idea that PS3/360 were some super powerful consoles is a complete myth. 8800GTX was 3.3X faster than the RSX in PS3 and they launched days apart. By June 2008, just 20 months years after PS3 launched, GTX280 launched with 5.75X the performance of PS3's GPU. We are 13 months out from PS4's launch and a GTX980 is about 2.5X faster than R9 265 ~ HD7850 ~ PS4's GPU.
http://www.computerbase.de/2014-09/...vidia/6/#diagramm-rating-1920-1080-4xaa-16xaf

All the facts are there but PC gamers refuse to do the legwork or they don't want to admit that PS3/XBox 360 were also weak underpowered consoles and became outdated just as fast if not faster shortly after launch.

 

[RussianSensation]

How do you conclude that? How me the math.

Because it's already been confirmed by Sony executives.

"According to Eurogamer, Ito said that after a gamer buys a PlayStation 4 for $399, as long as they buy a new game from the device maker and open a PlayStation Plus account, Sony will be able to generate a slight profit on that person."
http://www.cnet.com/news/playstation-4-to-sell-at-a-loss-but-sony-expects-profit/

Since we now have the facts that on average 4.42 games were sold with each PS4 thus far, and there are almost 11 million PSN subscribers, Sony is already making profits on PS4.

Again - my earlier post was purely in response to the "8 slow Jaguar cores will be faster than an i5 if programmed correctly purely because it's 8 vs 4 cores" comment someone made (which is false even with 100% perfect threading in Synthetic benchmarks) - not the cost or time constraint aspects of next-gen consoles.

My bad, you are right. An i5 would win but even an i3 would have been completely unrealistic as the budget would have blew the roof off since with Intel's 60% profit margins, they wouldn't sell it lower than $100 without the GPU, while Sony pays $100 for the entire APU with near 7970M level GPU in there.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Because it's already been confirmed by Sony executives.

"According to Eurogamer, Ito said that after a gamer buys a PlayStation 4 for $399, as long as they buy a new game from the device maker and open a PlayStation Plus account, Sony will be able to generate a slight profit on that person."
http://www.cnet.com/news/playstation-4-to-sell-at-a-loss-but-sony-expects-profit/

So you bended the truth. Its 1 game PLUS a Playstation Plus subscription (50$ per year.). Something only 1 of 8 got. And you talk about other people and their research?

 

[Bubbleawsome]

See my sig. You could easily fit nvidia and intel hardware into the power budget, the hard part is cost.

 

[RussianSensation]

So you bended the truth. Its 1 game PLUS a Playstation Plus subscription (50$ per year.). Something only 1 of 8 got. And you talk about other people and their research?

18.5 million consoles sold and almost 11 million PSN accounts. How is that 1/8th?

You also missed 2 other factors: PS4's BOM didn't remain static for 13 months from launch, and when Sony publishes the game, they can take up to $34 from each game.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2010/02/anatomy-of-a-60-dollar-video-game.html

Sony has published 13.68 million PS4 games so far out of those 81.8 million @ $34 a pop = $465 million in Revenue alone. Doesn't even count the royalty they collected from the other nearly 70 million games and nearly 11 million PSN accounts.

Ironically you are trying to argue that Sony actually loses money on the PlayStation division due to PS4 but even if that were true, which it isn't to begin with, it even strengthens the idea further that selling console hardware at a major loss (i.e., going i3/i5 + NV GPU) would have been a horrible decision. So still not sure what you are trying to prove here since if you are arguing that Sony's PS4 is an unprofitable console, then the console should have used even weaker parts than what Sony chose; but yet you are unhappy with the chosen parts. You can't seem to make up your mind at all about how the console business should work. :hmm:

Based on my data we know that:

1) PlayStation 4 division is already profitable
2) PS4 and XB1 are the most successful launch of any console generations in terms of sales
3) PS3 was outdated on day 1 and horribly outdated just 20 months after launch. Therefore, it was at least as bad as PS4, with only BluRay drive making PS3 stand-out
4) The pace of obsolescence is actually slower for PS4 than that of PS3 looking at 13 months after launch and using 980 as a reference point vs. using PS3 and GTX280 20 months after its launch.

So far you have provided no counter arguments to any of my claims as to why the current consoles are such failures and why choosing an 8-core Jaguar CPU via an AMD APU was an inferior option both performance wise and as a sustainable console business model financially, as well as spurring a wider adoption of new consoles due to more aggressive pricing as a result of slam dunk price/performance parts chosen.

Imagine what would have happened if ps4 offered 290X mining performance for $400. Not only you get the whole system for $150 cheaper but also PSU, CPU, mobo, ram etc included. And lest not talk of the resale value of used console vs gpu...

That wouldn't have happened and not just because of the GPU cost. Look at the total power consumption of modern consoles:

You can see the Xbox 360 is sitting at ~170-175W. A reference 290X uses over 250W by itself.

What did PC gamers expect exactly a $500 PS4 to have a GTX780Ti/290X + 4TB HDD and use water-cooling and a 500W Seasonic PSU, while Sony absorbs $300-400 losses on hardware? :biggrin:

See my sig. You could easily fit nvidia and intel hardware into the power budget, the hard part is cost.

Not possible. We cannot talk about how we can beat a PS4 using today's parts. GTX750Ti launched February 18, 2014.

By June 25, 2013, which is cutting it crazy close to the release date of PS4 for testing and manufacturing, NV released GTX760 with 161W power usage, or 68% more power than an HD7850 2GB, but only 45% faster.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_760/25.html

However, that launch was too close to realistically use in PS4 due to testing+manufacturing and logistics for Nov 2013 time-frame. To make launch date, you would have had to choose GTX660/660Ti/670/680, but all of them have higher power usage than 100W, so cannot be directly comparable to a 7850/7970M. Your only option at this point is the 680M with its 100W TDP.

Problem is 680M has a voodoo power rating of 143 vs. 7850 with 141. You gain nothing really while the former probably costs $300+ from NV. The 680MX had 122W TDP, so that wouldn't work.

That brings us to 770M, 775M and 780M. 770M < 680M, so that's a fail. 775M is basically identical to a 680M in performance, so that's not gonna work either. Finally 780M would have worked and provided 30% more performance than 680M/7970M/PS4's GPU. 780M had a retail MSRP of $750 USD. With NV's profit margin of about 55-56%, NV would have had to sell that GPU for $330 USD at cost to get just 30% more performance from PS4's GPU on launch date.

Considering in 4-5 years we'll have GPUs 5-10X faster than PS4 and an extra 30% would hardly make a difference for PS4 longevity in 2018-2019, it's fair to say it would have been the dumbest decision in the world to put a 780M inside a PS4/XB1 for a mere 30-40% faster GPU performance and for Sony to take a $400+ USD loss on the GPU alone because no way would NV have sold that GPU with $0 profit.

Therefore, Sony's choice for an 1152 SP GCN was hands down the best option possible.

 

[Enigmoid]

Sure I would have liked the consoles to be more powerful but frankly the last 4 years of PS3/360 generation, 90% of PC games were console ports and it's not like the extra power in those consoles actually resulted in some breakthrough graphics. The breakthrough graphics came on the PC games that focused on the PC like Crysis 1, Crysis 3 and Metro 2033/Last Light.

No but it sure resulted in some really nice optimization.

My bad, you are right. An i5 would win but even an i3 would have been completely unrealistic as the budget would have blew the roof off since with Intel's 60% profit margins, they wouldn't sell it lower than $100 without the GPU, while Sony pays $100 for the entire APU with near 7970M level GPU in there.

And here everyone who knows the wholesale price of the Console APU compares it to the retail price of the 'suggested components'.

Intel wouldn't sell it below $100 without the GPU? Intel is currently selling the cheapest i3s below $100 with the igp ($99 in MC). One of the higher end i3s.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/436566/Core_i3-4160_36_GHz_LGA_1150_Boxed_Processor

Lets be perfectly fair and reasonable here. After taking off reseller margins, S/H and other associated taxes and fees intel likely sells most of its i3 lineup around the $100 mark wholesale price. With 18.5M consoles sold, sony or MS would easily have gotten a very low wholesale price.

Now lets look at the pentium lineup, dual core and GT1, sells for around $50-70 reseller price. Strip off the igp and reseller margins and in bulk these chips would have cost around $40-50 in million unit shipment bulk. Hyperthreading costs nothing to implement.

Sizewise it would have been around 100-110 mm^2 for sandybridge. Even less so for IVB (70-80 mm^2). Tiny chips, low prices.

Now very likely the real reason they didn't go intel was that they wanted an APU and also intel doesn't like doing die shrinks of its existing architectures.

 

[USER8000]

People forget that the RSX,even though technically the same G70 chip as in the 7800GTX,was actually slower in reality. It had only a 128 bit memory controller(instead of a 256 bit memory controller) and half the ROPs of the G70 found in the 7800GTX.

From the RSX Wiki page:

The RSX 'Reality Synthesizer' is based on the G70 architecture, but features a few changes to the core.[9] The biggest difference between the two chips is the way the memory bandwidth works. The G70 only supports rendering to local memory, while the RSX is able to render to both system and local memory. Since rendering from system memory has a much higher latency compared to rendering from local memory, the chip's architecture had to be modified to avoid a performance sacrifice. This was achieved by enlarging the chip size to accommodate larger buffers and caches in order to keep the graphics pipeline full. The result was that the RSX only has 60% of the local memory bandwidth of the G70, making it necessary for developers to use the system memory in order to achieve performance targets.[9]