The Playstation 4’s CPU still remains somewhat of a mystery compared to the rest of the system. Sony are yet to provide info regarding the AMD Jaguar’s clock speed, although we do know a lot more about the processor. The CPU is rumored to run at between 1.6 to 1.8GHZ but has yet to be confirmed by an official source.
Recently, Johan Pilestedt in an interview commented on the PS4’s CPU, “Actually, I’m not sure – since the game needs to run on three vastly different platforms when it comes to performance we’ve never encountered a ceiling on the PS4, meaning we get to focus all optimization efforts on the PS3 and the Vita.
Well, clock speed increases the amount of processes each frame and we have never encountered any performance issues with the PS4. From a development perspective the clock speed isn’t important, only the percentage of frametime for each operation that we do – and with a faster clock speed each operation becomes faster.”
It’s a fairly interesting comment, but unfortunately doesn’t shed much light on the PS4’s actual CPU performance. We’ve known for some time that the Playstation 4’s CPU, which is an AMD Jaguar, is comprised of eight CPU cores. These cores are split into two modules (four cores in each module), and we even know a fair smattering of detail of the performance, Unfortunately, Sony have remained somewhat tight lipped over the actual clock speed. The Xbox One, which also uses the same X86-64 CPU as found in Sony’s machine, is running at 1.75GHZ.
Back before the machines launch, there were reports that the CPU ran at 2.75 GHZ due to an FCC filing regarding clock speeds. Despite several websites reporting that this was possibly a hint at the PS4’s CPU clock speed, it’s far more likely that instead that it’s something else, like the GDDR5 RAM (if you take 2.75×2 you get 5,500, which is the same clock speed as the PS4’s RAM. This makes sense due to the way GDDR5 memory is calculated.
Regardless, Helldivers (the title being created by Arrowhead Game Studios) is a top down shooter which doesn’t have a strong focus on graphics. Because the title is lite graphically, and focused on running on multiple platforms, including the PS3 an accurate measurement of the PS4’s CPU performance can’t be gained. We do have of course the texture generation benchmark which hints a good confirmation that the CPU of the PS4 will indeed be far slower than a PC desktop.
Interview via GamingBolt
