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> Everyone with a high-mid-range PC already has more horsepower than a PS5 and it’s not doing anything particularly innovative or groundbreaking.

The fact that it can stream 5.5gb/s from disk to RAM says otherwise. Commodity hardware, even high end m.2 drives can’t match that.

* it’s my understanding that it directly shares RAM between the CPU and the GPU which means way less latency and more throughput.

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There are high end drives on the PC market what can match and surpass that, but they are like $2000+ :) Linus talked about that topic last week: https://youtu.be/8f8Vhoh9Y3Q?t=1607

Watching some of that, and doing a bunch odd reading on the PS5, it seems that “some drives” can kind of get close, but the fact that the PS5 physically has custom, dedicated hardware that can directly move data from the SSD straight into shared CPU-GPU memory with minimal input/work from the CPU, and that’s a fundamental architectural advantage PC’s don’t have (yet).

I would sure like to see some architectural upgrades like this in PC/server world though: I’d love an ML workstation where my CPU-GPU ram is shared and I can stream datasets directly into RAM at frankly outrageous speeds. That would make so many things so much easier.

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