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.
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.
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.
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.