hooijdonk17
Member
I'm definitely willing to believe the rumors of yield issues but I still find it hard to believe a down clock. On the other hand that might be the least bad option. A delay to 2014 would be worse from a business point of view. It's been a while since my HW engineering days but I'm going to guess that heat isn't necessarily the issue here. ESRAM yields are the issue. If they down clock the ESRAM to help with that they likely need to down clock the coupled GPU.
Sony (read Cerny) were clever and they got lucky. APUs this large have never been done before and are high risk enough to begin with. Choosing to add a lot of ESRAM to the same die is literally asking for problems. If MSFT wanted a design that guaranteed 8gb of RAM they should have gone with a discreet GPU (7970m) with 4gb of GDDR5 and 4gb of DDR3 for their other stuff. Surely the extra power and simplicity of that design would be worth more than the efficiencies of an APU with a UMA. This reeks of a sloppy, rushed design. My guess is they didn't really want to launch this year (after running into problems with the HW in 2012) but that Sony forced their hand with their Feb reveal.
They couldn't do that, they needed memory pooling because their OS has a huge memory print; if they invaded 3GB of the 4GB DDR3 that would make life miserable for developers. They did what they thought was best..
It was still not a good choice though.