PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)

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Did Sony not experiment with laser projection into the eye ? Read that over 10 years ago during PS2 days but still sounds kinda scifi.

Retinal projection has been around since the 80's I think the original work was done at the University of Washington. It's really tantalizing tech, but two things have limited the viability.

1. Until the last few years it's been hard to get compact lasers with a decent color spectrum
2. It's difficult to get a reasonably sized exit pupil
 
Retinal projection has been around since the 80's I think the original work was done at the University of Washington. It's really tantalizing tech, but two things have limited the viability.

1. Until the last few years it's been hard to get compact lasers with a decent color spectrum
2. It's difficult to get a reasonably sized exit pupil


I lightly studied it while I was at UW a few years ago. It promises focal resolution above the other techniques so that your eyes can use not only parallax, but also focal information to allow your brain to find the distance the "virtual" objects are.

However, the refresh rate and resolutions achievable at the time was horrid, and would take a lot of research/time to produce anything workable IMO. It also wasn't something you can change on regular displays to achieve, unlike current 3D techniques.
 
I don't think it has been interesting enough for most folks to look at.

One thing to note is that there are a small set of traces to the general area of that package that go to things like the rectifier chip, the power LEDs, and some that might go to components sitting near the fan header, some other traces wander around in the general direction of other components.

Its general package is a common one, and the mounting doesn't prioritize things like data rate.
It may be a sort of platform managing microcontroller for managing sundry things that plug into different voltage levels and don't need the involvement of the APU or the low-power secondary processor.
This might allow it to help control the physical and electrical management of the console, but it wouldn't provide much of an interface that could let it participate in something that runs at high clocks and bandwidth like compute or the like.

It may have some miscellaneous additional functions, but I don't know if any secret surprises are there.
 
I don't think it has been interesting enough for most folks to look at.

One thing to note is that there are a small set of traces to the general area of that package that go to things like the rectifier chip, the power LEDs, and some that might go to components sitting near the fan header, some other traces wander around in the general direction of other components.

Its general package is a common one, and the mounting doesn't prioritize things like data rate.
It may be a sort of platform managing microcontroller for managing sundry things that plug into different voltage levels and don't need the involvement of the APU or the low-power secondary processor.
This might allow it to help control the physical and electrical management of the console, but it wouldn't provide much of an interface that could let it participate in something that runs at high clocks and bandwidth like compute or the like.

It may have some miscellaneous additional functions, but I don't know if any secret surprises are there.

Without a doubt its not a secret surprise or secret sauce, I thought perhaps it might be some authentication chip that helps prevent piracy. Kind of like the authentication random number generation chip chips on Apple motherboards who's absense on regular PC motherboards was used as a method of prevents OSX from running on PCs. I remember they were saying this generation they were doing even more to prevent piracy and bootlegged software from running on consoes.
I forget the term for that chip on the Apple motherboards.

edit: found it: Trusted platform module
http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+Sends+Lawyers+After+OSx86+Project/article885.htm
 
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I briefly wondered in this thread if a DRM-related reason could lead to a delay in disclosure about the chip, since there can be some anti-circumvention legal concerns when researching something involved in encryption or content control, but silence could just mean it's that boring.

It wouldn't take much bandwidth to be used as a secure store, although its physical separation allows for greater visibility of traffic to and from the chip when today's level of integration could put all that on a processor, where it becomes much harder to intercept.

If it is involved in some kind of trusted computing, it looks like it's doing a bunch of other completely unrelated things.
 
Kind of like the authentication random number generation chip chips on Apple motherboards who's absense on regular PC motherboards was used as a method of prevents OSX from running on PCs.

A few Macs had a TPM chip but no version of OSX ever used it. Apple make zero effort to stop OSX running on non-Apple hardware.

I'm sure I'm remember ERP posting that in terms terms of hardware useful for games, there are no surprises left in PS4. So the chip is likely system glue or security.
 
I think it makes perfect sense for them to keep open the option to have guaranteed availability of that feature at this time. They may still add it later though.
 
I think it makes perfect sense for them to keep open the option to have guaranteed availability of that feature at this time. They may still add it later though.
The option need only be "Disable controller light when no Playstation Camera detected".
 
What's so hard about enabling the controller lightbar ONLY when a piece of software actually enables the camera? There's no need to have the light burning constantly, or constantly IF there is a camera detected and so on. Most of the time the camera isn't actually being USED (cue NSA-peeping-through-keyhole cartoon image here, ooo-EEE-ooo... :LOL:)
 
The option need only be "Disable controller light when no Playstation Camera detected".

It is also used for non-camera owners. I think they told devs it is always there to use. If they do change it they better do it soon to cause the least impact..
 
Did they say that the muteable controller speaker wouldn't be similarly guaranteed?

The light bar isn't positioned in a way that it can be permitted to have a non-camera use that isn't just as much fluff as the speaker.
 
Or duct tape if it really bothers you.
If only duct tape enabled the battery to run longer like an 'off' setting would...

I don't think anyone here is clamouring for an off setting for any other reason than 'LED off = longer battery life'. I believe someone on GAF dissembled their DS4 and discovered that there were two light diffusion barriers and some very high intensity LEDs in there so powering them off could net substantial battery life improvements
 
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