Posted on Monday, June 11 2012 @ 8:47 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Hexus
heard rumors that Sony's next-gen PlayStation may feature a quad-core AMD APU based on the upcoming "Steamroller" design as well as a GCN-based on-die GPU.
The site's sources have stated that the chip's codename is 'Liverpool', a quad-core AMD APU based on the firm's upcoming 'Steamroller' processor core design, which will be produced on a 28nm fabrication process and clocked at 3.2GHz. Paired with a GCN-based on-die GPU, Liverpool is likely to be one of the firm's first APUs to feature support for heterogeneous computing and, as such, the PlayStation 4 is expected to utilise a unified memory structure, with reports suggesting that the console currently features 2GB of RAM in the specs, though Sony is mulling over the idea of 4GB following developer requests.
Though AMD APU technology is progressing at an impressive rate, on-die GPUs still aren't powerful enough to drive a high-end console and so, according to psx-sense sources, Sony's next-gen console is expected to include a discrete Radeon HD 7970 GPU. On a side-note, it has also been suggested that the console will feature 16GB of on-board flash alongside a hard drive, allowing for more substantial, yet secure firmware updates.
