The highly-integrated Sony PlayStation 4 system-on-chip integrates eight AMD x86 Jaguar cores, custom AMD Radeon HD core with unified array of 18 AMD GCN-like compute units (1152 stream processors which collectively generate 1.84TFLOPS of computer power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two), various special-purpose hardware blocks as well as multi-channel GDDR5 memory controller.
“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,” explained John Taylor, vice president of global communications and industry marketing at AMD.
In the case of the PS4, AMD leveraged the building blocks of its 2013 product roadmap – the same technologies one will 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. This APU architecture enables game developers to easily harness the power of parallel processing.