Perhaps as touted their custom x86 CPU is actually that and further from Jaguar than they get credit for. It may well be fully based on Jaguar but perhaps it actually took a lot of Ryzens efficiency improvements and baked that in there to offset the GPU. All that tech seemed mighty close to Hovis in explination to me also, and perhaps makes a package of changes that allowed them to push the GPU clocks.
I think the modifications - at least those listed at Hotchips - were about IPC gains for modest engineering costs with very little area increase. The kinds of changes mentioned were either in the memory subsystem or modest capability improvements in the cache subsystem. I don't think they were about power rails granularity (?) or additional power gating for the cores - a much larger undertaking.
A chip normally has a number of pins relating to power. I don't think Hovis is just about giving more power to some chips than others - you might as well increase the bin parameters and run everything hot. I think Hovis also allowed for adjusting power to certain areas of the chip so the entire chip was within a certain range. This allowed for compensation for areas that needed power that would have been outside the typical range, as you could save power elsewhere.
Given that consoles operate far away from the extreme limits of power/frequency, this allowed the acceptable band of total power/heat to be raised relative where X1/PS4/PS4Pro/X1S operate.
I think the tested.com testing is so un-insightful as to invite compromised conclusions.
![D5CFFQSXoAIsF-r[1].jpg](https://forum.beyond3d.com/data/attachments/3/3032-7836a840189d60da9075d11fc82f63c3.jpg "D5CFFQSXoAIsF-r[1].jpg")
