We check the CPU of Playstation 4 and Xbox 720, at least as far as we can now. The current game consoles of Microsoft and Sony are getting old and can not keep up with their current gaming PCs. This has also led to the progression of PC games stalled, as many PC game consoles are console consoles. In addition, the Xbox 360 and much more the Sony PS3 are far away from conventional PC hardware, which makes the porting of games on or from PCs not necessarily easier.
Jaguar in double pack - for PS4 and Xbox 720
With the Sony Playstation 4 and the upcoming Xbox 720 changes now completely. AMD processors, which are specifically designed and built for the consoles, are based on conventional x86 CPUs, which makes the porting of games easier. AMD calls these processors "semi-custom APUs", the abbreviation APU stands for "Acceleated Processing Unit."
The Xbox 720 can not keep pace with performance
According to what has so far been leaked, Sony and Microsoft are using very similar APUs with eight cores and integrated Radeon graphics unit. Sony has confirmed that the Playstation 4 will be based on an AMD-APU at a press conference in late February.
The latest quarterly report from AMD, in which the AMD boss Rory Read speaks of several design wins for semi-custom APUs, suggests that this will be the case for the next Xbox. More details about the upcoming Xbox 720 can be found in our multiplayer.
AMD uses the Jaguar CPU for the CPU part of the new console processors. Jaguar is the CPU component of the new AMD APUs to be used in devices such as tablet computers or entry-level notebooks. The upcoming Cores with the Codename Steamroller designed for AMD's "large" processors would be too large and too powerful to be combined with a strong Radeon graphics on a chip.
Compared to its 40-nanometer predecessor Bobcat, which can be found in the E-series AMD processors, the Jaguar, which has been manufactured in 28-nanometer technology, has grown quite well. Thus, the number of processor cores has doubled from two to four, so in the console APUs are two Jaguar modules, which combine the CPU part of the processor. The L2 cache shared by all four cores was also doubled from one to two MB.
On the architectural level, Jaguar has increased in all areas compared to Bobcat: the jump prediction has been improved, the processor supports the current SSE4 command sets as well as AVX and also the functions for out-of-order execution of commands have been extended. This makes Jaguar faster than the processors in the PS3 and the XBox 360 despite a rather moderate clock frequency of 1.6 GHz. Nevertheless, Jaguar's performance is still far short of the performance of Intel's core processors
As a GPU part in both console processors probably a Radeon of the Southern Island generation will be integrated. The Southern Island Radeons of the 7000 series are already manufactured at TSMC in 28 nanometers and can be combined so well with the Jaguar CPUs. Sony announces the Radeon GPU in the PS4 that it is composed of 18 computing units and provides a computing power of 1.84 Teraflops. This is slightly above the performance of a Radeon HD 7850, which is in the upper middle class.
If the rumors are true, then the upcoming Xbox 720 can not keep up, because with it the GPU consists only of 12 Compute Units with 1.2 Teraflops performance. In general, the game developers can get a higher performance from the GPUs with consoles, because they can adapt the graphics code better to the hardware than with PCs. The CPU and the GPU access the same memory for both console APUs (Unified Memory).
Sony uses very fast and expensive GDDR5 memory with a memory bandwidth of 176 GB / s. Microsoft is content with the Xbox probably with 8 GB of conventional DDR3 memory with a bandwidth of 68 GB / s. However, the GPU will have an additional 32 Mbytes of ESRAM, which will make sure that the GPU does not have to wait for the main memory. For the GPU main memory and ESRAM together should deliver a bandwidth of 170 GB / s.
The architecture of semi-custom APUs may indicate that the "heterogeneous system architecture" (HSA) presented by AMD last year could be used for the first time. CPU and GPU are no longer addressed as separate units, but via a common runtime, which distributes the tasks to be solved on CPU and GPU. In memory, the GPU does not use a separate address area more, as is the case with Unified Memory. Microsoft is also working on concepts for heterogeneous Manycore processors.
A problem with the new processor architecture is, however, the lack of compatibility with the previous console generation. The PS3 uses a Cell processor with an IBM Power as a general purpose CPU and a further seven streaming processors specialized in floating point operations. The 3-core RISC processor in the XBox 360 is also based on IBM's Power technology. In the XBox 360 is already already at least an ATI GPU. The PS3 also uses a separate Nvidia GPU.
This means that existing games are definitely not binary-compatible and difficult to adapt. Sony will therefore go for the compatibility of old games the way of the Game-Streamings and has bought the cloud gaming provider Gaikai. The games run on servers at Gakai and are remote-controlled via the console. The graphic is then streamed via the Internet. Whether Microsoft offers a game streaming via Xbox Live or try it with an emulation is still open. For the sake of completeness, there are rumors that the Xbox 720 should provide a backward compatibility to old games through a separate chip.
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