Brian East 🍐

A lot of people (esp on the PC side) don't seem to realise the consoles have mitigating hardware that alleviates certain CPU overhead, hence comparing the CPU to a PC CPU equivalent isn't exact. The I/O system in the PS5 circumvents CPU oversight on decompression, check-in etc, and according to Sony is equivalent to 11 Zen 2 cores worth of performance (the PS5's CPU has 8 Zen 2 cores). Then there's the Tempest Audio chip which is equivalent to a whole PS4 Jaguar CPU's worth of SIMD performance and handles all audio, but can even be used for games seperate to that. This might be part of the reason PS5 is performing comparably to the RX 6700 in Digital Foundry's equivalent GPU test, despite their PC rig using a Core i9 13900K CPU, which is notably more performant than PS5's CPU or the roughly equivalent Ryzen 7 3700X, and considerably more expensive ($470 vs $150 on PC Part Picker today). Not to mention the 6700 GPU also has a higher clockspeed and infinity cache over PS5's GPU (though PS5 has higher memory bandwidth). This isn't to suggest these consoles don't have fairly lacklustre CPU's, instead the point is it's not an apples to apples comparison comparing equivalent CPU on PC, as PC equivalent CPU won't have other custom hardware to reduce CPU utilisation, nor carry out tasks the CPU might ordinarily do, like the PS5 and PS5 Pro have. #PS5Pro #PS5