GDDR5 RAM Question

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Skurope

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Mar 22, 2014
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Hello,
I was thinking about the PS4's GDDR5 ram the other day and came up with a possible bottleneck; there has been claims going around that this ram is the future and the best that you can get, I have to disagree and let me explain why: GDDR5 is essentially VRAM right? Thus will have have high latency in comparison with DDR3. Thus you can say it is not suited as main memory, sure the graphics will work well but does this not mean the PS4 has a bottleneck on the CPU side of things? Since it is an APU the GDDR5 RAM is unified. Surely it would have been better to use DDR3 for the processor and GDDR5 as dedicated VRAM? I see that the PS4 also has 256MB of DDR3 but only for background tasks and is used in conjunction with a secondary weak processor.
If somebody could explain this that would be great, I came across this thought while watching the peasants fight xD
Thanks
 
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from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_technical_specifications :


Main program RAM

The PS4 contains a total of 8 GB (16× 4 Gbit (512 MB) memory chips[20]) of GDDR5 unified system memory, and is capable of running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz (5500 MT/s) with a maximum bandwidth of 176 GB/s.[14][21] This is 16 times the amount of RAM found in the PS3 and is expected to give the console considerable longevity.[22][23] The unified memory architecture allows the CPU and GPU to access a consolidated memory, removing the need for separate, dedicated memory pools.


Meaning: The APU uses system ram, in...
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paulbatzing

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i7Baby: Part of the new innovations with the PS4 was that the system has a shared GDDR5 pool of ram.

Skurope: One of the big advantages with GDDR5 is bandwidth. I guess the latency limits the access time of a single process, but anything that has several subprocesses will not be affected much. The ps4 has 8 cores and games will shurely take advantage of the six available to programs. So as long as things work in parallel, there are ways to work around a possible single thread bottleneck.
 
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paulbatzing

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from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_technical_specifications :


Main program RAM

The PS4 contains a total of 8 GB (16× 4 Gbit (512 MB) memory chips[20]) of GDDR5 unified system memory, and is capable of running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz (5500 MT/s) with a maximum bandwidth of 176 GB/s.[14][21] This is 16 times the amount of RAM found in the PS3 and is expected to give the console considerable longevity.[22][23] The unified memory architecture allows the CPU and GPU to access a consolidated memory, removing the need for separate, dedicated memory pools.


Meaning: The APU uses system ram, in this case GDDR5 ram.
 
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Skurope

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Mar 22, 2014
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Thanks for explaining that, I meant to click you previous answer as best answer but wasn't paying attention!
 
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