GDDR generally has higher latency than DDR in return for higher bandwidth. The reason is that the minimum read/write size is much higher, so the overhead of add

GDDR generally has higher latency than DDR in return for higher bandwidth. The reason is that the minimum read/write size is much higher, so the overhead of addressing is lowered. For graphics applications, this is a good tradeoff as they generally use large objects (e.g. textures) but for existing compute applications, the latency penalty is often too high. The PS4 can presumably get away with this as applications will be specifically written for it, unlike PCs which have to support legacy software.