Posted on Friday, February 22 2013 @ 13:40 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD revealed some more details about the PlayStation 4's APU in a new
blog post. Marketing executive John Taylor confirms the PS4 will feature a semi-custom designed AMD APU jointly developed with Sony.
In fact, the PS4 is the first announced design win based on semi-custom AMD APUs. This further demonstrates our commitment to take AMD technology into adjacent high growth markets as we diversify beyond the PC.
What exactly is a semi-custom APU? Let me elaborate:
At the most basic level, an APU is a single chip that combines general-purpose x86 central processing unit (CPU) cores with a graphics processing unit (GPU) and a variety of system elements, including memory controllers, specialized video decoders, display outputs, etc. Our semi-custom solutions take the same treasure trove of graphics; compute and multi-media IP found in our APUs, and customize them for customers who have a very specific high-volume product that could benefit from AMD’s leading-edge technologies.
In the case of the PS4, we leveraged the building blocks of our 2013 product roadmap – the same technologies you find in the latest AMD APUs powering PCs, ultrathin notebooks and tablets – to create a solution that incorporates our upcoming, low-power AMD “Jaguar” CPU cores with next-generation AMD Radeon™ graphics delivering nearly 2 TFLOPS of compute performance! This unique APU architecture enables game developers to easily harness the power of parallel processing to fundamentally change the console gaming experience. Not only creating the opportunity for new possibilities in software design, but also faster and more fluid graphics.
