*** Playstation 4 CPU Equivalent? ***

[futurefields]

You still have very weak parts compared to last gen (relatively speaking the xbone is using a low end GPU and the ps4 mid-range). The CPU isn't any better than mediocre. Its on hardware the devs know too so don't expect the same huge learning curve + gains that last gen had.

This 100%. Xbox 360 was so much more advanced for it's day than the new consoles. The CPU's on these things truly are a joke and the bigger problem than the GPU.

With a lower tier GPU all you need to do is scale back your graphics a little. But your game is still intact. Reduce shaders, pare back lighting/shadows a little bit. But the gameplay is the same.

But with a weak CPU you can't do much, except for write simplistic games with weak AI, weak physics etc... thats what a lot of people really dont get. You need a strong CPU to drive more advanced games. Not sure what the system designers were thinking here except for they could use the "8 cores!" as a marketing bulletpoint.

Gonna be a long generation. And people were hoping for better PC ports this time around too. Why would that happen?

The games industry NEEDS these consoles to be seen as BADASS. So therefore, PC will suffer. We all know PC has 10x the horsepower especially on the CPU end. It will never be used efficiently so get used to spending 1000$ every generation to keep up with a $300 box.

 

[know of fence]

What are you talking about? PS3 or PS4?

Thanks, fixed.

 

[Enigmoid]

They are working with a very different memory architecture to a standard PC.

True. But the RAM doesn't change the amount of brute force CPU or GPU power you have available. I'm not sure about the specifics but didn't the xbox 360 have shared RAM?



We will have to wait and see

 

[PliotronX]

 

[TeknoBug]

From what I read earlier this year, it's somewhat identical performance-wise to my laptop's A4 5000 (4core 1.5GHz) except it has 8 cores (probably 2 separate chips molded together). My PS4 performs nicely mostly because of its GPU, apparently stronger than the XB1's although the XB1 can somewhat keep up due to its eSRAM (when the kinnect is disconnected of course).

Hopefully soon we'll see FM2+ variants of those 8 core CPU's.

Gonna be a long generation. And people were hoping for better PC ports this time around too. Why would that happen?

Actually people are predicting that this console generation is going to be shorter (5 some odd years maybe).

 

[Bman123]

I'd be fine with the current gen only lasting 5 years, a ps4 is only $399 new. Just make the next system backwards compatible and add a more capable CPU

 

[eton975]

Wouldn't two Athlon 5150s (if that was possible) be the closest equivalent?

 

[Erenhardt]

How does 1600Watt Vacuum Cleaner compare to 1600Watt Lawn mower? That basically is comparing 2xathlon 5150 to console APU. Both use 1600W electric motor, but the difference is quite big

 

[eton975]

How does 1600Watt Vacuum Cleaner compare to 1600Watt Lawn mower? That basically is comparing 2xathlon 5150 to console APU. Both use 1600W electric motor, but the difference is quite big

What's the difference, on the CPU side?

 

[SlickR12345]

Pentium sounds about right, its not even i3 levels of performance. Its very weak on single core performance and overall it might be similar to Pentium but we have to also take account of the fact that games don't typically scale well across lots of cores so despite having 8 cores its rare they will all be used, so on average its even worse than the anandtech review would suggest.

Its actually more powerful than most cpu's out today on both AMD and Intel.

Console games always take advantage of the hardware they are offered, squeezing the max out of it, so expect pretty much 99% of the games from 2015 to support 8 cores on the consoles.

Since the memory is also integrated, the connection between the cpu-memory-gpu is faster, adding more performance gains.

 

[Enigmoid]

Its actually more powerful than most cpu's out today on both AMD and Intel.

Console games always take advantage of the hardware they are offered, squeezing the max out of it, so expect pretty much 99% of the games from 2015 to support 8 cores on the consoles.

Since the memory is also integrated, the connection between the cpu-memory-gpu is faster, adding more performance gains.

Well yeah if the games were allowed to use 8 cores. Games only have access to 6.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Consoles uses a trick to make it work. Reduce features and complexity etc. Its silly to expect some magical performance just because its a console.

 

[crashtech]

Its actually more powerful than most cpu's out today on both AMD and Intel.

What do you mean by this exactly?

 

[Gikaseixas]

There's nothing equivalent. It was specially designed for console duty.
It had to meet a certain criteria

 

[Bman123]

I have no trouble with my ps4 but I'll be building a new desktop for the next fallout game for sure

 

[Headfoot]

Gonna be a long generation. And people were hoping for better PC ports this time around too. Why would that happen?

x86 and GCN

 

[Blitzvogel]

Its actually more powerful than most cpu's out today on both AMD and Intel.

Maybe if you only consider Intel Atom's and AMD's Jaguar/Puma CPU/APUs. You have to consider that 1.6 GHz is half as fast as most mainstream desktop and many laptop CPUs. 3.0 GHz i5s absolutely **** all over the PS4's x86 cores. GPGPU means taking away visual rendering performance so there is that to consider but it'll likely used on a limited scale.

 

[futurefields]

Its actually more powerful than most cpu's out today on both AMD and Intel.

Console games always take advantage of the hardware they are offered, squeezing the max out of it, so expect pretty much 99% of the games from 2015 to support 8 cores on the consoles.

Since the memory is also integrated, the connection between the cpu-memory-gpu is faster, adding more performance gains.

This is such a load of trash.

 

[Roland00Address]

Its actually more powerful than most cpu's out today on both AMD and Intel.

Console games always take advantage of the hardware they are offered, squeezing the max out of it, so expect pretty much 99% of the games from 2015 to support 8 cores on the consoles.

Since the memory is also integrated, the connection between the cpu-memory-gpu is faster, adding more performance gains.

I am sorry but you are flat out wrong.

It was selected for the consoles due to several reasons.

• the die space to performance ratio is the highest AMD offered at the time
• they purposefully wanted to go low power on the cpu for they wanted to bring the tdp of the chip down. AMD big cores do not perform better than the little cores at the tdps AMD was targeting.
• they did not want to go with a 2 chip solution they wanted an apu
• they wanted an x86 chip
• intel was the other option that gave them all this but they are much more expensive

So they went with a crappy cpu for they were not willing to raise the tdp, they insisted on a one chip solution now in 2013 not later with a specific tdp, and they were not willing to use intel due to costs. With those priorities Microsoft and Sony definitely made the right decision.

To put in a 1 single sentence, Microsoft and Sony went for the cheap but crap APU so they can make higher profits, and make profits on the physical hardware on the first day of sale

But the cpu is still a piece of **** and is still slow as dirt. Sure on multi thread at this specific tdp, it could be a lot worse but games are not cinebench. You can't use all 8 cores at 100% in real life, and the single thread performance for similar intel processors is like 3 times faster at similar tdps.

If you can get 2 cores at 100%, 2 cores at 80%, 20 cores at 60%, and 2 cores at 40% load then you are only using 70% of the cpu power you really have, and those numbers I just gave is eternally oppostistmic, they are no where near going to get that high of cpu utilization in real life. There is a limit on how much you can multithread a game, no matter what you have to have a primary thread and that primary thread will have higher cpu utilization than all the secondary threads. Also the developers only have access to 6 cores not 8, 2 are reserved for the OS.

Lets put it this way on the broadwell core m we are likely to get similar cpu performance from broadwell in a 4 to 5 watt tdp that includes graphics. Remove graphics and boost the tdp to something like 8 or 10 watts and they will be able to sustain that performance all the time and it won't be a "boost" Oh yeah and the single thread performance will be 3x faster more or less. Now this is a year later on 14nm vs 22 or 28 but my point still stands, the box makers went cheap, I do not blame them, just please don't tell me its champagne when its reality water with food coloring (I went with the much nicer saying instead of the classical idiom)

 

[monstercameron]

I am sorry but you are flat out wrong.

It was selected for the consoles due to several reasons.

• the die space to performance ratio is the highest AMD offered at the time
• they purposefully wanted to go low power on the cpu for they wanted to bring the tdp of the chip down. AMD big cores do not perform better than the little cores at the tdps AMD was targeting.
• they did not want to go with a 2 chip solution they wanted an apu
• they wanted an x86 chip
• intel was the other option that gave them all this but they are much more expensive

So they went with a crappy cpu for they were not willing to raise the tdp, they insisted on a one chip solution now in 2013 not later with a specific tdp, and they were not willing to use intel due to costs. With those priorities Microsoft and Sony definitely made the right decision.

To put in a 1 single sentence, Microsoft and Sony went for the cheap but crap APU so they can make higher profits, and make profits on the physical hardware on the first day of sale

But the cpu is still a piece of **** and is still slow as dirt. Sure on multi thread at this specific tdp, it could be a lot worse but games are not cinebench. You can't use all 8 cores at 100% in real life, and the single thread performance for similar intel processors is like 3 times faster at similar tdps.

If you can get 2 cores at 100%, 2 cores at 80%, 20 cores at 60%, and 2 cores at 40% load then you are only using 70% of the cpu power you really have, and those numbers I just gave is eternally oppostistmic, they are no where near going to get that high of cpu utilization in real life. There is a limit on how much you can multithread a game, no matter what you have to have a primary thread and that primary thread will have higher cpu utilization than all the secondary threads. Also the developers only have access to 6 cores not 8, 2 are reserved for the OS.

Lets put it this way on the broadwell core m we are likely to get similar cpu performance from broadwell in a 4 to 5 watt tdp that includes graphics. Remove graphics and boost the tdp to something like 8 or 10 watts and they will be able to sustain that performance all the time and it won't be a "boost" Oh yeah and the single thread performance will be 3x faster more or less. Now this is a year later on 14nm vs 22 or 28 but my point still stands, the box makers went cheap, I do not blame them, just please don't tell me its champagne when its reality water with food coloring (I went with the much nicer saying instead of the classical idiom)

a single jaguar core was much smaller than a piledriver module which as ~similar to a sandybridge core. that aside, there arent many options on the market for this kind of product. Also the trend is multithreading, if you can break the barrier[new algorithms etc.] you can extract much more performance than a single core ever can. It also help that GCN is a decent compute card. Gosh you guys are cranky.

 

[Roland00Address]

a single jaguar core was much smaller than a piledriver module which as ~similar to a sandybridge core. that aside, there arent many options on the market for this kind of product. Also the trend is multithreading, if you can break the barrier[new algorithms etc.] you can extract much more performance than a single core ever can. It also help that GCN is a decent compute card. Gosh you guys are cranky.

I am not disagreeing, jaguar was the least bad option if they went with AMD (hell I wrote that they have a similar ipc and much smaller die size). And there were many advantages with going with AMD such as GCN being better than the older intel graphics (we see if gen 8 changes this but gen 8 is still not out) as well as getting a much cheaper price.

It is still not a good cpu though, it is just the least bad cpu from a certain company for the task they were being used for. It is a pretty good gpu for instance on the ps4.

 

[futurefields]

Gosh you guys are cranky.

???

Thinks consoles are underpowered... must be cranky.

:\




It's called being accurate.

 

[Aolish]

......Console games always take advantage of the hardware they are offered, squeezing the max out of it......

The closest equivalent literally speaking would be this: http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2750D4I

But if you want PS4-quality gaming, I recommend at least a Core i3, or preferably a Core i5. Console games are much more optimized than PC games.

^This here, sometimes it seems that this bit of information missing. With developers getting more and more familiar with next gen hardware and the fact that developers can code to the metal much more efficiently on consoles than on PC, the games will start to look better and better. As of right now ps4 games look insane. I can't imagine what games will look like later when developers get more familiar with the hardware. Just look at the last gen games. It'll be very difficult to be able to run any of those games with similar 360/ps3 specced out hardware on PC.

When we start getting (or getting ports) of xb1 and ps4 games over to the PC, I have a feeling some serious juice will be needed to run those games. Just look at some of the next-gen games, we are already seeing i5-i7 requirements on these xb1/ps4 games. And these machines just came out.

I think some of this overhead might be alleviated when DX12 comes out. But honestly, even with dx12 I don't think it'll be possible to reach that level of "code to the metal" over to the PC.

Of course I'm no programmer, I can't even make a website so clearly I'm no expert and of course I could be wrong on anything i just mentioned.

.................Perhaps buy an Intel i3 clocked at 3.7Ghz.

Thanks. : ]

I would really recommend something much higher than an i3. Infact go as fast as possible. If budget is a concern, then a board that supports i7s or later (bios updates) would really help later, so at least u have something to work with.

 

[Idontcare]

This is a divisive topic...but my opinion is that the folks who would know, and have the experience to prove they do know, decided that the hardware they chose (and the pricepoint which that hardware then enabled and defined as MSRP, etc.) was what their market would bear.

So why Jaguar, why not something that was considerably more powerful or expandable?

Because it was quite literally all that the market would bear in terms of cost structure and capability.

Why do iPads exist and who buys them?

The capability of the hardware fits the demographic at its optimal pricepoint.

tl;dr console hardware would be more capable if it weren't for the fact that console buyers are too cheap to pay for the hardware that already exists and would deliver higher performance

 

[crashtech]

Makes one wonder if a more souped up console would sell enough to be profitable. In fact, given all the segmentation that exists in the PC and mobile device markets, I am a bit surprised there isn't a higher performing console model being offered.