James Sawyer Ford
Member
ERP has always been careful to qualify his statements that the major benefits he is seeing from the DME only apply if the 32MBs is actually SRAM. Unfortunately 32MBs of SRAM would take up a massive amount of space on the chip, which is why most of us have assumed we are actually looking at a form of embedded DRAM (which includes the MOSYS 1T-SRAM). Considering our bandwidth numbers for the 32MBs of on die memory can be calculated by simply multiplying the 360's eDRAM 32GBps for 10MB by 3.2 to get 102.4GBps for 32MBs, it is tempting to conclude they have simply scaled the 360's eDRAM up linearly. In that case the DMEs may be both convenient & necessary, but may not provide the more interesting benefits he is speculating about.
Conversely, we have also heard rumors that Durango's APU is very large and suffered some major yield issues. That could mean we are looking at a huge block of actual SRAM.
If the latter scenario is true and they are using a huge block of SRAM, I wonder why they would actually go that route instead of just getting a beefier GPU.
I can't imagine the performance gains from SRAM overcoming the additional complexity, chip size, and yield issues to make it a more worthwhile investment over just having a larger GPU.