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Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

AMD’s press release seems to have more detail. Subor is creating both a gaming PC running Win10 and a console with their own OS, presumably Linux-based.

The CPU and GPU are on the same die, while the GDDR5 is on the motherboard through a 256-bit interface.

https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2018/08/03/n...

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Darn, I was hoping Valve had actually done something to make a SteamOS system in China.

I should think that the Chinese Communist Party would love to maintain a stranglehold over gaming media in China. Making a version of SteamOS and making a success within China would align with how Chinese tech companies have formulated business plans.

If it has any flavor of social media, the party has a mandate to control and monitor it unfortunately.

8 gigs is not much for a PC. It'd be cool to have more memory, even if DDR4. I wonder what the Linux kernel would make of multiple kinds of RAM with different performance characteristics.

Intel did some work on this for the Xeon Phi that had fast on-package memory and slower main memory. IIRC they use fake NUMA nodes to separate the RAM.

> fake NUMA nodes

Is it really fake if the memory access is non-uniform? Maybe it's unconventional?

You got me there. I think conventionally each cpu is a child of one NUMA node so in this case they had to make a NUMA node with no cpus, which isn't quite correct. https://colfaxresearch.com/knl-mcdram/#fig-3

GDDR5 as CPU RAM sounds crazy in the best possible way.

PS4 has this since 2013.

Isn't it much higher latency than DDR4?

No it doesn't.

GDDR5 is bad for CPU as it sacrifices latency for throughput. Cache misses and branch mispredictions become so expensive and in the end it's inefficient.

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