Playstation 4 – AMD Jaguar CPU 1.8GHZ – PS4 Rumor and Two Disabled Compute Units

The Playstation 4”s AMD Jaguar CPU clock speed has yet to be officially confirmed by Sony, but there is recent evidence and rumors to suggest that the CPU is running at 1.8GHZ. Previously, based on comments from various developers and speculation we’d guessed the PS4′s CPU was running at 1.6GHZ. Remember that the AMD Jaguar is designed to run up to 2GHZ, so the 1.8GHZ is right in the Jaguar’s range.

[obliteratorFTW]

Hmmm interesting.

[XB1_PS4]

I think MS overclocked up to 1.75 because the box is so big, it ventilates well. While I believe that there is no problem with over heating on the PS4, I do believe there would be a problem if they clocked to 1.8.. That's a pretty big jump for a tiny box like PS4.

[blackbeld]

"That’s basically 128 stream processors (64 per compute units). Or, about 204GFLOPS of computing power that’s not usable (just for fun)"

Interesting read. Still it's only rumours but if this is true then.. hmmmm.

Very nice.

[yewles1]

"Interesting read. Still it's only rumours but if this is true then.. hmmmm. "

The clockspeeds are rumor, but the two CU's were confirmed by chipworks. This proves that the PS4 has a gimped 7870 and the X1 has a gimped 7790, as two CU's were confirmed by MS devs as well.

[Indo]

@blackbeld

Future Proof

[Computersaysno]

Radeon 7870 ghz has 20 CUs, 80 Texture Mapping Units, and 32 ROPS @ 1000mhz. Memory bandwidth is the same for 7870 and 7850, 153GB/s

Far as we know PS4 has 18 CUs (2 disabled) Probably 72 TMUS because of this (4 per cluster, 2 clusters disabled) and the full 32 ROPS.

Clockspeed as far as we know is 800mhz. Main system memory bandwidth is 176GB/s, but this is shared. There was talk the CPU gets about 20GB/s, which puts the remaining memory bandwidth for the GPU right in the ballpark of the Radeons it is based on (150Gb/s odd).

This makes PS4's GPU very slightly faster than a stock Radeon 7850.

The Jaguar based CPU runs between 1.5 and 2.0ghz on current applications in quad core variants. There were rumours PS4 was going to be 2ghz at one point.

It is perfectly realistic that it could run 1.8ghz in PS4, the architecture is lower power and designed for these clockspeeds.

The increase in heat and power consumption over 1.6ghz would be small and pretty insignificant.

You could push it over 2ghz but at that point you start to lose power/heat balance relative to performance, in other words it isn't worth it because the design isn't optimal for it. Those factors increase exponentially faster than performance does.

1.8ghz would represent a tiny and meaningless boost over Xbox One's CPU, but it would be faster.

What actually matters here is the resources reserved by Sony/Microsoft.

Sony may eventually be able to give back a core or at least a percentage of CPU utilisation as time goes by and they refine their OS.

[ChrisW]

@Indo,

Unless you consider "Future Proof" being able to last and out-perform for a century or more, I'd avoid using it.

[n4rc]

Its been a marketing battle...

Trust me.. If sony got it above 1.75 they would have announced it.. My guess is its at 1.6..

[Rocky5]

Need to remember MS has a custom Jaguar, each core can do 6 ops/cycles per core instead of the 4 per core the PS4 does, so upping the clock a tad would not do much for the PS4

If they increased the GPU speed then that would probably give a better result, but may cause bottlenecks due to the CPU speeds.

But if you start upclocking CPU/GPU more heat get produced & with the PSU internal that's even more heat.

For all we know the clock speed could be bellow 1.6, until Sony officially announce it we can only speculate.

Also aren't Sony legally bound to release the specs, for products that are released? You can't sell something without telling people what it is/does/can do.

[Abriael]

Too bad that it says clearly "estimate" and it's from October to begin with.

[Computersaysno]

We'll soon find out if someone can dump the system details, if nothing else we can get clockspeeds like we had when a hacker did it to Wii U. You can bet someone is already working on it if Sony don't care to tell us.

1.6ghz or 1.75ghz or 1.8ghz it doesn't matter too much, 2ghz would be a good jump over 1.6ghz (25 percent more) but it probably wouldn't be that high due to yields and voltages therefore power consumption/heat trade off.

Anything between 1.6 and 2.0ghz is realistic.

Fact is Microsoft squeezed a bit more speed out their CPU- how?

They did it by talking to AMD, and examining if they could still make a lot of chips that worked within design parameters. You only know this when you start making then and testing them!

The goalposts do move quite quickly.

If Microsoft did it by talking to AMD and testing their chips, why wouldn't Sony also?

Stands to reason they also had this discussion, whats the best speed we can get that means we make enough working chips?

It is possible they left it at 1.6ghz, but also entirely possible they could have a little bump too.

[gamertk421]

Probably downclocked to 1.5 for fear of heat issues.

[dericb11]

Your IQ is 1.5 cause you really can't read can you.

[sprinterboy]

People like you need educating, I feel sorry for you

[HardcoreDaBoss]

hes obviously a troll and hes npot good at it

[ELCUCO]

Secret sauce confirmed?

Edit: btw I'm running a 7200rpm HDD in the PS4 which as of now has produced no more heat than my PS3 would (Knock on wood).

[Abriael]

Nope, it's just an "estimate" from a website, and it's old to begin with.

[kingduqc]

A slow ass cpu running at 1.8 ghz... wow.

btw ps4 got sata 2, so you will get bottle necked by it if anyway (somehow they are using fucking old standard)

[hiredhelp]

Called keeping cost down SATA 2 is still ok lets face it if ppl can run 72,000rpm drives compared to 52,000rpm on ps3 its gonna help.

[kingduqc]

hiredhelp

Sata 2 limit 7200 rpg drive and ssd and ssd/hdd hybrid drive.

[decrypt]

@hiredhelp

Thats 7200rpm, 5400rpm, i think the fastest hard drives out there achieve 15000rpm lol.

[ELCUCO]

I was also kind of skeptical about it, which is why I wanted to try it out. I did a speed comparison with a few buddies of mine. 3 of us Installed BF4 at the exact same time. The single player portion was ready to play almost instantly. Theirs took a few minutes, but what really impressed me was that the full game installation was done in almost half the time of theirs.

Heres another example I pulled off of youtube comparing stock HDD (5400RPM) to 7200RPM on a PS3, Which is not SATA III https://www.youtube.com/wat...

[hiredhelp]

Thx decrypt late night lol.
@kinducqc. 7200 is better than ps3 5200 thats what im aiming at yes a ssd would be awsome replacement. As fastest drives sandsik for example. But there still costly when comes to magnetic drives when comes to high capacity drives low cost.

[codelyoko]

Duplicate :P

http://n4g.com/news/1395188...

Remove the extra compute thing, should be fine then i guess.

[dericb11]

Kept hearing it was 1.7GGHZ, now it's 1.8GHZ. They put in some real work. Proud to remain on Team Playstation.

[Autodidactdystopia]

why work cause they changed the base clock, by literally changing a setting?

AMD did the work... all they did IF they did was change a setting from like 116mhz to 118mhz multiplier would remain unchanged.

[Sevir]

Its a joint venture by AMD and Sony's Engineering team. AMD may have supplied thechips but the upclocking, Customizing of compute units and more was done and tested extensively by SCEJ.

[Volkama]

The info everyone expected at that recent AMD event where Sony laid out the design of the chip.

My guess is still 1.6ghz as I don't see why Sony would neglect to mention it if it was higher. 1.6 and 1.75 will have negligible impact in the real world, but it's fuel for arguments that they just don't need to confirm.

[Bathyj]

Fair point

[Kayant]

I agree if you look at what both MS & Sony has mentioned in their press releases/talks for the media/masses you can see where the weaknesses of each console lies.

And I think that is fine they have the power where it really matters the GPU & the customisation for GPU compute(GPGPU).

[Holeran]

Where did the rumor come from and how was it found to be running at 1.8?

[devilwillcry]

Total bs

[pyramidshead]

Ps4 doesn't need an upclock... lol An upclock would be down right murder to the competing consoles.

[MasterCornholio]

The only thing that I will ask is

Why didn't they announce this if its true?

Regardless from what I've seen the PS4 is a pretty capable console.

Nexus 7 2013

[indysurfn]

@Mastercornholio

I'm with you on the question, but don't assume it is not true because they didn't announce it.

Remember:

Microsoft didn't announce that their system had 47MB of cache until a couple months ago.

Sony didn't announce 4GB was in fact 8 gigabyte of GDDR5 until Microsoft backed themselves into the corner going full steam ahead in the retail manufacture ring. Even though there was a rumor out there that it was 8gb of ddr3.

Sony didn't announce the recently found separate core after launch, or the 2Gigabit memory that goes with it, still!

Obviously they are both playing games with each other, pun not intended.

[thisismyaccount]

Anyone here has a link or video of that AMD event for their Jaguar or what ever they showed ? prior the PS4 launch.

Completely forgot about that... thought they would announce the final specs of the ps4 during that event.

Thanks in advance if you have anything.

[Belking]

There was nothing to announce. PS4 specs have been locked for months now.

[thisismyaccount]

Nvm found it, via asus site

APU13 Event something-something

http://rog.asus.com/2708520...

[Xavy]

This console is made 4 gamers ;)

[bornsinner]

why would they not release specs of the cpu? something tells me it's underclocked for heating issues which is causing games like killzone to not run at 60fps

[cabbitwithscissors]

The CPU on the PS4 doesn't need an upclock. It has GPGPU to do the extra work which gives a whole lot more processing power compared to a minimal upclock on the CPU.

[ZBlacktt]

No matter what they are running, fact remains one is 1080p machine and the other seems to be a 720p machine. It's already been known the PS4 is more powerful. Anything else is just adding to it.

[HardcoreDaBoss]

it takes time to understand the xbox one. both are capable of doing 1080p

[husomc]

sure, Xbox One will do Tetris in 1080p

[BOLO]

Takes time to understand? What?! Both consoles are running X86 architectures...What is the learning curve on that for developers compared to the Cell and Xenon CPU? Gosh my head... http://www.youtube.com/watc...

[ZBlacktt]

Bolo,

Don't make excuses for a multi billion company? Also, if they are so much they same. Then what's the problem again? We know the PS4 was co created by Game developing companies. So it's also very well know how easy it is to work on. Again, the same you say?

[HardcoreDaBoss]

well both things I said were facts. I dont care about disagrees from sony fanboys at all. And understanding how to use the newer esram takes time to learn.... and if anyone thinks the xbox one cant run 1080p games they seriously need some help.... gosh my head really hurts... fanboys just running a muck on N4G..

[1nsomniac]

If you've seen or heard of any of the other stuff released by this guy you can ignore this as everything he says is complete mindless shit.

I hope the CPU is overclocked as much as it can without having problems but this guy is a complete joke & knows absolutely nothing about components or computing yet rants meaningless rubbish as fact or rumours & the majority of the time he actually gets them completely the opposite way around. He makes himself look like an idiot over & over again & either completely ignores it or is completely oblivious to it.

This is the same guy that claimed last week the sub system chip was "secret & hidden" completely ignoring the fact Sony spoke about it in depth back in February when they announced the system.

[DRambo]

Is he your friend?

[Tzuno]

A quad core with higher freq' would have been better. Anyway there are quad cores that smoke consoles cpu.

[Persistantthug]

Consoles dont need to run Powerpoint, Word, or Excel.

The mobile cpu the PS4 has is fine.

[CaulkSlap]

There's dual cores from 5 years ago that smoke the new console processors. GPU and RAM is the right priority and PS4 hits a great balance.

[badboy776]

WOW this is Amazing.

[Ohai]

This is the info I've been waiting for...I hope it's @ 1.8 or above, but 1.8 would be fine.

[aquamala]

1.6Ghz or 1.8Ghz, a slow CPU either way

[Crypt0117]

If this was true. Sony would publicize this. They love to talk specs. And 1.8 would be greater than 1.75. So I call it not true. Probably 1.6 like we previously have been told.

[Metfanant]

would love to hear confirmation from Sony either way

[MidnytRain]

Isn't 1.8Ghz really low for a CPU? Most standalone CPUs you can buy right now start at 3 Ghz.

[Holeran]

This is a low power CPU meant to be clocked at a low frequency so as to not waste electricity and still provide good results.

[Metfanant]

most standalone CPUs are not 8 core either

[MidnytRain]

Why do cores matter? AMD's 8 cores are clocked higher, and even those are outperformed by many of Intel's 4 cores.

[dakunclear]

.....I have a AMD FX 8320 which is a 3GHZ 8 core with all the stuff I have in my computer plus a AMD Radeon HD7770 I'm only using 351W of power and 8gb of ram so they could of gone better specs but the cost would of been higher.

[Dehnus]

1 of your FX8320 cores also leaves 1 jaguar core in the dust.

[Metfanant]

cores matter a lot...whenever the number of cores expands generally clock speeds decrease..

not long ago 3ghz would have been considered "slow" on single and dual core processors...as time goes on clock speeds increase, and then we generally see the number of cores expand again...

for instance...

maybe you dont remember far enough back to when dual core CPU's first started becoming mainstream...clock speeds took significant hits but performance increased significantly

[MidnytRain]

I'm looking at the proof. The 3770k/4770k are hella fast, and only four cores. Looking at AMD's much slower 6 and 8 cores, I see no reason to even mention the core count.

[Dehnus]

1 Jaguar Core is no Match for a Core I3 Core.

8 Jaguar Cores maybe, but it depends on what you want to do. As just adding more cores does not work for every computing task.

[Agent_hitman]

2 CU were disabled by Sony intentionally to improve production yields. Those additional Stream processors or CU were probably dead since they were manufactured on the plant, meaning they cannot be used by developers or even Sony

[Metfanant]

i wouldn't say they are "probably dead" but when you're manufacturing these things there are always going to be errors...the more headroom you give yourself the better your yields will be...

if you want your GPU to use 20 CU's...and only build them with 20CU's on the die then any GPU's with faults must be tossed and you lose money and you have less working chips for production so you cant make as many consoles..and lose more money...

there are probably a significant number of PS4's out there with 20 fully functional CU's...

[badboy776]

So What does this mean?

[Mister_G]

Faster CPU than X1, by a tiny amount.

[Mister_G]

It can go up to 2.75Ghz apparently....

http://wayback.archive.org/... http://gamingbolt.com/plays...

[Madderz]

As much as i'd love this to be true, this would have come to light by now surely.

BS article.

[Dehnus]

People, like before with the CU's and AGAIN NOW.

Those CU's will not be activated. This is not "Just for fun!" what ponies think but to increase yields.

The same goes for clockspeed. That the Jaguar doesn't go over 2ghz right now is not because the chip can't, but because it uses alot more power when pushed over 2ghz. The power useage would start to go exponentially higher then the computer capability you get from it.

The other problem with increasing clock speed is thus NOT that you can't, but yields. If a cpu has an error at 1.6ghz does not mean it has the same error at 1.4ghz. Please people there is no secret sauce... stop this.

If the PS4 is clocked at 1.8ghz it was intended from the start to run as that. But if they selected 1.6 as their target for yields it will run at 1.6. Increasing it to 1.8 means that some people would get bricked consoles as their CPU just is not able to run at that speed.

Reffering to things as "The PSP also had it's clockspeed increased!" does not change that. The PSP was 333mhz from the start, also advertised as such. It only was downclocked because of the battery. So upclocking it later had no effect for early addapters outside of a shorter battery life!

[josephayal]

The PS4 is alien technology that we can never max out

[alexmurur]

Its so weird consoles having such less power belch out such games and graphics... Lets catch hold of MS and their windows.. let them answer why having powerful pcs cant do the same things while being almost thrice the price... I am building a workstation and its my third.. Linux and Mac run better.. i would expect better performance from the pc after paying so much on the hardware and windows.. Anyway, next gen onwards i guess consoles would be the only affordable options for gamers.. And whats with all great games nowadays going console exclusive..

GO GO Consoles!!