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PS4 and Xbox One will both support a unified memory access system known as hUMA, despite earlier reports that this was a feature only found on the PS4.
Earlier this week it was reported that AMD’s senior product marketing manager Marc Diana had told press that only the PS4 had support for the hUMA shared memory area.
AMD later released a statement, stating Diana had “made inaccurate statements regarding the details of our semi-custom APU architectures.”
However, it turns out that the Xbox One does in fact feature a memory implementation comparable to hUMA.
A certified Xbox One developer took to Reddit to clear up the situation.
“Somebody had PM’ed me earlier linking to the Ars article on how the PS4 has a big advantage over the Xbox one due to hUMA. This was apparently said by some AMD marketing manager.
“I haven’t heard of hUMA until today, so I went to look it up. The way I understand it is that in addition to having unified memory access (shared memory between CPU and GPU), which allows the GPU to read CPU memory, it is also a coherent cache system.”
The dev added: “I remember reading something on this when I got my first alpha kit. I pulled up a couple of our internal white papers and it’s pretty clear that this was the exact implementation in the Xbox One’s memory system.
So there you go, both systems will support hUMA or an equivalent system, but what exactly does this mean? Well, AMD says that hUMA promises to deliver more performance from the same form factor, which means both the PS4 and Xbox One may actually be more powerful than the hardware specs led us to believe.
The chip maker also says that the tech will help lower development costs thanks to a more efficient architecture, which in turn means less people will be needed to do the same work.
Source: Reddit
