Through an article that was posted on EuroGamer today, Digital Foundry has presented us with a hefty list of information that has been sourced to be involved with both Sony and Microsoft's next generation systems, which is commonly referred to as the PS4 and Xbox 720. Fans can take a look at a few concept photos of the Xbox 720 and PS4 in the slideshow above this article.
Through the content that was delivered, Digital Foundry goes into detail about what type of processing power will be delivered through the GPU systems that will be implemented into the Xbox 720 and PS4. Speaking of this, in a previous article we revealed that the PS4's GPU with the clock that 1.84 teraflops. In comparison, the Xbox 720's the GPU has been revealed to be clocked at around 1.23 teraflops.
However, there's a fair amount of "secret sauce" in Orbis and we can disclose details on one of the more interesting additions. Paired up with the eight AMD cores, we find a bespoke GPU-like "Compute" module, designed to ease the burden on certain operations - physics calculations are a good example of traditional CPU work that are often hived off to GPU cores. We're assured that this is bespoke hardware that is not a part of the main graphics pipeline but we remain rather mystified by its standalone inclusion, bearing in mind Compute functions could be run off the main graphics cores and that devs could have the option to utilise that power for additional graphical grunt, if they so chose.
Previous rumours have suggested that Orbis runs its CPU cores along with some graphics hardware inside a standalone, custom AMD Fusion core with a separate, discrete GPU. Our sources suggest otherwise - all of these elements are embedded into the same piece of silicon, and we can confirm that the internal codename for the processor is indeed "Liverpool", as was mooted some time ago. Sony does have some form here for pushing the envelope - PlayStation Vita represents the only mobile GPU processor that combined quad-core ARM Cortex A9s with the PowerVR SGX543 MP4. Even on the power-hungry iPad 3, Apple stuck with dual-core CPU architecture at the same 45nm fabrication node.
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