The custom APU that will be found inside Sony’s PS4 is by far the most powerful AMD has ever produced, the chip maker has said.
APUs (accelerated processing units) are a relative newcomer to the computing world and are designed to offer an additional processing option that operates alongside a machine’s CPU.
The custom PS4 APU, which has been designed with Sony, will be at the heart of the console’s graphical output.
"Everything that Sony has shared in that single chip is AMD [intellectual property], but we have not built an APU quite like that for anyone else in the market,” AMD global business unit head of marketing John Taylor told The Inquirer.
“It is by far the most powerful APU we have built to date, it leverages [intellectual property] that you will find in our A-series APUs later this year, our new generation of APUs but none that will quite be to that level of sheer number of cores, sheer number of teraflops."
AMD has also confirmed that a cut-down version of the PS4’s Jaguar based APU will be put on sale to the public later this year – albeit without the same number of cores and minus some of Sony’s key design input.