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by brucethemoose2 1086 days ago
They are neither, they are both fully custom.

One thing thats under-appreciated is the immense design/tape out cost (9 figures these days, maybe more?) of a fully custom chip. That is a huge flat expense, hence one does not simply make a custom design unless the volume (or margin) is absolutely enormous.

AMD/Nvidia/Intel can't just casually crank out an APU for Valve, as one might think. I'm not even sure MS/Sony can justify a die shrink this generation... Heck, maybe the PS6 will run commodity PC hardware.

1 comments

Compared to what came before, the previous (Modified AMD Jaguar APUs) and the current-generation (Modified AMD Zen 2 APUs) consoles are commodity PC hardware compared to whatever bespoke cost-optimized ISAs consoles used to be built around. So in a way, it's already somewhat commodity PC hardware under very heavy TPM lockdown.