Yes. But imo they have less incentive to do so. It's MS that if rumors are true is much more in need of a performance boost. Considering it will likely come at some cost-yield, heat, etc, one needs to be motivated to do so. Sony might say in the given example, "well we still have comfortably more flops, plus our RAM is faster, no worries". The motivation is lesser.
Also there is less and less time here, even for clock boosts. Sony event was in February, but MS event will be in May. That's 3 months difference. I imagine that will be very near the point where EVERYTHING has to be locked down and finalized. For consoles to be in stores in Nov, production cant be that far away now. It's also occurred to me, I have no idea if they think this way at all, but if they truly did a upclock, it might well behoove them to not mention it on the 21st, to prevent a response before it's too late. They dont have to give a flop number out on the 21st at all. They could list other specs, call it a custom AMD GPU and not give any details, and show games. Sure some devs might know, but it'd likely take a while longer for info to filter that route back to Sony.
Anyways I still think an update to 12Gb is also pretty possible. I consider them about equal in possibility actually. Certainly late RAM upgrades are now developing a pretty solid history in consoles.
We dont know they'd be "torpedoing production capacity", and 10-20% more performance is pretty important, arguably especially for Durango.
How often is "The PS4 has 50% more flops!!" thrown around?? You're telling me if that was cut to 25% it wouldn't be a big deal? LOL.
1.8/1.4=1.285 (~28% faster). The message board wars would be changed quite a bit on that alone.
You really think that's all? The only thing I have to go on is the 10-12 CU SI parts, and those stock at 1ghz with models even factory overclocked to 1100 mhz readily available at little premium. I understand it's hardly a perfect analogue.
From an armchair perspective 960 mhz, 20%, would seem doable. But I understand there's so much we dont know about. I also understand both being clocked at 800 initially by rumor, probably means it's a sweet spot at the least.
But I do think this idea that these parts in Durango/PS4 can magically go to exactly 800 mhz and not one mhz farther literally cant be true.
bbot was just talking about MS upping their clocks to get competitive advantage with the rumoured PS4 specs. Ignoring the whole performance comparison debate, given reported similarities in architecture I don't see how MS could have the option to up the clocks a little but Sony do not, so that avenue seems a dead-end to me. If MS decide to up clocks to compete, Sony should be able to do the same thus undoing the performance advantage. The end result would be two platforms that run a little faster than they would otherwise be running, but also running hotter and possibly with a higher failure rate, and neither console company gaining from the move.
