AMD Will Sell Modified Version PlayStation 4's APU
AMD plans to sell a scaled down version of the PlayStation 4 APU sans Sony's technology.
John Taylor, head of marketing for AMD's Global Business Units, recently told The Inquirer that the company plans to release a modified version of the Jaguar-based APU that's used in Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4. It will be a "cut down" version that won't feature Sony's proprietary technology. It also won't have the same number of cores or the same computing capability.
"Everything that Sony has shared in that single chip is AMD [intellectual property], but we have not built an APU quite like that for anyone else in the market," he said. "It is by far the most powerful APU we have built to date."
He said the PS4 APU leverages AMD technology that consumers will find in the company's A-Series of APUs slated to arrive later this year – its new third generation. But they won't have the same number of cores, or the sheer number of teraflops. This ability to take one architecture and customize it for various clients (AKA consumers, Sony, etc) is part of the company’s "flexible system on chip strategy".
The Inquirer makes an interesting observation. "Sony's decision to opt for AMD's x86 APU had left some commenting that the PlayStation 4 is merely a console made out of commodity hardware," the report states. "But given that AMD will be selling the commodity version of the chip minus Sony's technology, perhaps for the first time the industry can see just how much work console designers such as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do beyond the standard hardware available to consumers to squeeze out more performance."
So far the details surrounding the PlayStation 4's APU have only focused on AMD's portion of the joint venture. Taylor said in a blog last week that the PS4 is "the first announced design win based on semi-custom AMD APUs". It will have eight 64-bit x86 AMD Jaguar cores, and a next-generation Radeon GPU producing 1.84 Teraflops of computing power.
"The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) has been enhanced in a number of ways, principally to allow for easier use of the GPU for general purpose computing (GPGPU) such as physics simulation," Sony said. "The GPU contains a unified array of 18 compute units, which collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two."
Naturally the console maker didn't offer the ingredients to its special sauce used in the PlayStation 4's custom APU. That's OK Sony, we'll find out soon enough.

APU's aren't bad as workhorses. They outperform Intel in threaded workloads at their price point.
APU's aren't bad as workhorses. They outperform Intel in threaded workloads at their price point.
Desktop APUs are generally intended for low/mid-range PCs.
The PS4 APU has a quad-channel (256bits) GDDR5 memory controller, while the FM2 socket only has dual-channel DDR3 to work with which is about 1/5th as much RAM bandwidth as the PS4.
The current APUs are already memory-constrained at 2133MT/s so AMD cannot make their IGP much faster without going for 2400+MT/s DDR4, quad-channel or eDRAM of some sort.
Spend say $300 on combined Processor and GPU. Then $50 on case, $60 on HDD, $40 on RAM, and $50 on PSU.
Same thing I was wondering.
I wouldn't be surprised if its just a modified version or even the same apu that the ps4 has. If not then im stumped as well.
APU's get beaten by Intel chips on the CPU side because AMD dedicates a good portion of the die to the GPU compared to Intel, leaving less room for the CPU half of the processor. Architectural and transistor size differences aside, if Intel has more space on their die for the CPU than AMD does, Intel will have a better CPU. Once you factor in Intel's higher IPC and smaller manufacturing node AMD is forced to either significantly increase the die size, increase clock speeds, or both in order to try and catch up.
If you compare socket FM2 to socket 1155 you will see that the AMD dies are much larger. Some of AMD's FX chips have higher stock clocks than Intel chips in order to close the gap but power consumption is much higher and overclocking K-series chips gives Intel a huge per-core speed advantage again. AMD's APU's will never be able to compete with Intel's Core lineup and they were never designed for it in the first place.
tl;dr: APU's target a totally different market than i5's and will never compete with them on the CPU side.
Well it compares to a mid-high range system today. By the time the console is released it will be in the mid-range. This is about the same as the xb360/ps3 were when they were released. Of course for
Sony => went AMD
Microsoft => went AMD
Valve (SteamBox) => again AMDs APU
Now as far as CPU competition goes, in multithreaded apps AMDs CPUs tend to win.
How many cores is PS4 going to have? 8! Ouch. What are the chances that console ports will be able to utilize multiple cores on PCs as well? Very hich.
Now, even without this multi-threaded story, AMD's APUs wipe the floor with Intel's.
AMD is also used to smaller profit margins, than Intel. (when comparing CPU prices, don't forget to account for motherboard price difference).
you really dont need a super powerful cpu / when the gpu tends to be more imporant in those uses.
AMD could make a powerhouse APU, but they make plenty of money selling discrete graphics cards. If they were to make an APU with 7850 power graphics, they might undercut their own discrete GPU market as well... I would love to see a powerhouse APU from AMD though
And it can not be used by AMD....well maybe AMD could try a bit harder after failing last few years - numbers do not lie!
Soultion : Sony should be chip maker/dev and AMD could take a rest and think what they have done wrong.
It would be so cool to be able to say I have Sony CPU and Sony VGA. lol
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6726/3dmark-for-windows-launches-we-test-it-with-various-laptops/2
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6508/the-new-opteron-6300-finally-tested/14
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/01/amds-trinity-faces-off-with-intels-ivy-bridge/
I would post more benchmarks, but just go to anandtech and see the latest benchmarks. In no way, shape, or form does AMD 'wipe the floor with Intel' in, well, ANYTHING! The only place the benchmarks are even CLOSE is when you measure an 8 core AMD CPU vs. a 4 core Intel CPU like an i3 that doesn't do hyperthreading or is painfully locked in core speed binning. Attrocious for people to try and mislead with information like that.
* Throws wallet at screen.