När Sony nyligen körde den första officiella presentationen för Playstation 5 i en teknisk genomgång, fick vi bland annat en närmare inblick i hur konsolens CPU fungerar. Den har så kallad "variable clock rates" baserat på AMD:s SmartShift-teknologi.
Under presentationen gav hårdvaruarkitekten och presentatören Mark Cerny intrycket att spel som ska optimeras till Playstation 5 kräver att man manuellt anpassar det till CPU-designen. Men nu har Cerny förtydligat detta och förklarar för Digital Foundry att detta sköts automatiskt:
"Developers don't need to optimise in any way; if necessary, the frequency will adjust to whatever actions the CPU and GPU are performing. I think you're asking what happens if there is a piece of code intentionally written so that every transistor (or the maximum number of transistors possible) in the CPU and GPU flip on every cycle. That's a pretty abstract question, games aren't anywhere near that amount of power consumption. In fact, if such a piece of code were to run on existing consoles, the power consumption would be well out of the intended operating range and it's even possible that the console would go into thermal shutdown. PS5 would handle such an unrealistic piece of code more gracefully."
Cerny förklarade också att utvecklings-kiten av Playstation 5 faktiskt stödjer låsta klockfrekvenser istället för dynamiska eftersom det underlättar utvecklingen:
"Regarding locked profiles, we support those on our dev kits, it can be helpful not to have variable clocks when optimising. Released PS5 games always get boosted frequencies so that they can take advantage of the additional power."
