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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

The last “interesting” PlayStation in that regard was the PS3. The 4 was just a PC. The contemporary Xbox also had an interesting CPU, also PPC ISA. All successors were mostly x86 PCs.

There may be some ARM fun in the future, as thermals are a huge thing now (the PS5 is mostly a heatsink with a computer attached and the newest Xbox is kind of a chimney).

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"just a PC" is a bit misleading. It's a x86 CPU, but the fail0verflow guys themselves do not call it a PC. From their talk on running Linux on a PS4:

https://youtu.be/-AoHGJ1g9aM?t=425

They are x86 APUs with a very powerful GPU and high memory bandwidth. Something you can not buy on the open market to use it as a PC so far.

I think LTT had some boards they bought from China that are very similar to the ps5 mainboard. PCB even looks nearly identical with the ring configuration of the layout.

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1383323-why-is-amd-selling-b...

Those have the gpu disabled

But that is just the CPU. Basically the expensive part (the beefy integrated gpu) is not working and thus the still working parts (cpu, memory, io, etc) are being sold instead of being thrown into trash.

Yea, I was just pointing it out.

That’s a good point. The 5 has about the same memory bandwidth of an M1 Max, which is something you’ll only find in 2-socket big Xeons (NUMA excepted), but the PS4 is on the same ballpark of a Threadripper Pro. Still, they are very much PCs with memory systems that are not available in general purpose boxes of the same price.

I remember, however, some benchmarks on motherboards with console CPUs that were somewhat disappointing because the GDDR6 memory has high bandwidth at a higher latency cost that the internal caches couldn’t hide.

Still, if you can tune your workload for it, it may be an interesting compute box.

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