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Comment by throwawayk7h | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of ps5 hardware features like shared memory between cpu and gpu which I'm not sure games could take advantage of without being specially coded for it.

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Shared memory between CPU and GPU isn't exclusive to consoles. All (?) integrated GPUs do it. Mobile devices, PCs, Apple Silicon, it's all the same.

The only big difference is consoles have the CPU using GDDR memory (what dedicated GPUs use) instead of typical DDR. You're not going to need to code anything differently for that but it will have different performance characteristics.

I think you very much want to code differently if you were to target gddr instead of ddr. Unless you were only working at a high-level of course, but it would significantly influence eg the rendering engine

Is it something wihch would make PS5 attractive to run local LLM models? I've heard Mac Mini shared CPU/GPU memory makes it popular for that.

No, unified memory is not a panacea. The PS5 GPU is mostly raster-focused and doesn't have good acceleration options outside Vulkan compute.

Your best ~$300-400 option for inference is still the RTX 3060 AFAIK.

The Mac studio also comes with up to 512GiB RAM.

The PS5 only has 8GiB.

The PS5 has 16GiB but your point still stands.

This is how every iGPU and embedded SoC with a GPU work. It’s not exotic or something that games need to be specially coded to handle.

AMD APUs on PC still basically require setting up a fixed split between VRAM and RAM, instead of truly sharing memory like consoles or Apple silicon

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