I knew this would happen from the moment Tretton mentioned PS4 has phenomenal yields. You cant have great yields without redundant transistors, and few additional CUs are perfect contenders because CU's take A LOT of chip surface area. The larger surface where you have redundancy = better chance you can salvage chip that has production errors.
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PS4 Has 20 GCN Cores (2 redundant) according to Chipworks Teardown Analysis
- Thread starter coldfoot
- Start date
Heh, that's a good question. Is there any way of figuring this out?
fatgamecat
Member
So.. which is the dedicated audio chip?
Are they going to decap the other lesser known chips as well?
Are they going to decap the other lesser known chips as well?
64 shaders per core. 64x18=1152 shaders.
1 CU = 64 Stream processors
I think it was because of the Neo Geo Color so NGC could be confused
Locuza
Member
Nice information.I take that course now and I must say that I am impressed by the size and scale of such manufacturing.
I thought we already knew it? Isn't it 1.8 Ghz?
It has never been confirmed, AFAIK.
Edit: Nope, 1.8GHz is One, PS4 it's supposedly 1.6GHz, like One before the upclock.
SneakyStephan
Banned
In pc land they sell the ones with defective cores as lower end parts
make hd 7870s with 20 gcns, all the ones with a flaws somewhere on the die have 4 cores disabled and are sold as hd7850
It's a modular design, lots of identical cores that work in parallel and if one or more don't function they can be shut off and the gpu still works
since there is only one sku of the ps4 (no different models with different performance) they chose to go with 18 out of 20 so they have 2 as redundancy in case one or more come out broken. That way they don't have to throw as many chips away.
A good percentage of the ps4 chips will actually have all 20 cores be fine, but they'll be disabled all the same of course.
My cpu is a 4 core phenom II with one of the cores disabled, It cost me only half of what the quad core version costs (despite being an identical chip in every way) since it's a 'runt' that is sold as lower end part.
A lot of people managed to reenable the 4th core on these cpus through a special bios with certain motherboards as amd had to sell a lot of fully functioning quad cores as 3 cores to meet demand.
Mass Effect
Member
Makes sense.
What? But I thought the Gameboy color was abbreviated "GBC"
It's impossible to quantify the performance of a computer as a single figure. Each machine might have radically different pipeline units, structure, special features like vector units, different methods of branch prediction, more cache levels, etc. Different sets of instructions (programs) will execute differently on different machines and some may run better than others.
THE:MILKMAN
Member
I'm really surprised with the size of the APU die of 20x20mm (400mm^2 right?)
OK, makes sense
No, otherwise it wouldn't make sense cause the extra 2 are there in case one or two of the other 18 are defect. If they weren't there you would have to throw away the whole chip.
the reason is that National Geographic Channel owned the "NGC" abbreviation at the time the GC came out and Nintendo had to change it to avoid copyrights. kinda like the WWF->WWE change that happened long ago.
I thought the thread was going to be about that, lol.
A thread about how many GameCubes equals a PS4 incoming...
THE:MILKMAN
Member
Damnit. Didn't realise there were multiple pages.
Bucket Mouse
Member
The more you know!
Seems like it.
Impressive compared to the RSX, witch was a HEAVILY cut down 7800GT.
Thanks Nvidia.
phosphor112
Banned
Makes sense. Also, I like how "plain" it is. Sony chips have always been fucking crazy.
Mr. Wonderful
Member
I wonder if at least one of these will be able to be activated in the future after process shrinks via firmware. This isn't like the Cell where they could hardly produce a perfect version.
Robot Pants
Member
Me too
Oops lol
KennyLinder
Member
20 Gamecubes taped together confirmed.
flipswitch
Member
I'll be sure to open up my ps4 to make certain I have the 18 cores, any lesser and it goes back to the shop. I don't trust Foxconn anymore.
The 2 redundant ones became the Wii.
michaelius
Banned
And who would buy PS4 with 18 if you could get 20 ?
Brad Grenz
Member
I'm not familiar enough with how Bluetooth radios to say so difinitively, but if they are using the BT 4.0 hardware in 2.1 mode to get the bandwidth they need for the controllers+audio they can't very well advertize support for 4.0 if they can never enable it.
Zabant
Member
You obviously don't surface that info to the people buying it, I mean shit this is the first i've even heard of it, they wouldn't know.
It would be a cool little bonus for some, and for those without, they know the games are guaranteed to run just as well anyway.
Android smartphones have been using & listing Bluetooth 4.0 as a tech spec feature since late 2011, despite the fact that Android didn't support Bluetooth 4.0 until Android 4.3 Jellybean, which just came out in July. Also, the WiiU lists Bluetooth 4.0 as a tech spec feature & I doubt it's taking advantage of the new Bluetooth features.
So it shouldn't matter whether the PS4's OS supports Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy right now or not. They should go ahead & list Bluetooth 4.0 + EDR in the tech spec sheet.
Kinda crazy to think that we was happy with the Gamecube graphics at one point on our SDTVs now we have ~ 200X more power & we are looking at games & complaining about it's shortcomings.
Zabant
Member
There's precedent, it's been 12 years since the launch of the gamecube. 12 years prior to that (1989) the NES was the most powerful nintendo console on the market.
This jump has been far less impressive.
Graphics Core Next. The Radeon 7000 series architectures shader cores. The title is wrong though, it has 20 Compute Units, many more shader cores (1152 )