Mark Cerny "The Road to PS4"

I found it self indulgent.

Particularly why he was great for his latest role.
Bullet list of reasons on slide:
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome

Also 'The 3 Musketeers' !? ..... Please!!

Talented guy. Didn't like his presentation style. Didn't have a patch on many of the TED speakers who are genuinely inspiring, and draw the audience in.

His presentation style is very low key but I am guessing that is just his personality. He does have an interesting mix of "ego" and "equanimity" at least from the presentation. I didn't find him off-putting but I did notice his bent towards self promotion. I wonder how that comes across in a Japanese company or if he isn't like that in "real" life.

I hope we aren't going to compare console presentation to TED talks now :LOL:
 
As said in the other thread 8 ACES with 8 queues each,mem volatile tag and onion + were Sony impulsed enhancements for its APU,and of these, AMD will use whatever they want in its desktop products(the Sony ACEs for example will be used in Sea Islands but was a Sony custom thing first).

Well guess we wont see themnin xbone if its a sony enchancement.
 
DICE 2002:

November 2012:

He almost outed the PS4 at the end of the interview 1:11 when talking about DRM. "PS ffff-three which is what I've been working on" :LOL:
 
"Friend in Kyoto" gave me a chuckle...

On a side note, the change towards practicality in design was visible before the PS4 (e.g. the Vita). With Kutaragi out of the picture, Sony's semiconductor prowess has atrophied quite a bit and refocussed on other businesses (e.g. camera sensors). Part of his being able to push for rather adventurous architectural leaps was his drive to make Sony a cutting edge semiconductor company that had industry leading fab capabilities. That is something that is no longer a priority.
 
Sony's attempt at playing at having leading-edge semiconductor prowess was one of the largest overreaches of the PS3's generation.
There was the massive expenditure for a fab for all the products Cell was supposed to find its way into that never came to pass.

Looking back now, in my opinion, it seems much of what made Cell was exotic stemmed not from good vision, but a deficiency in the expertise of two of the three partners in STI when it came to creating hardware as complex as a modern and robust computing solution.

IBM wanted a homogenous solution that played to its expertise in multiprocessor coherent systems, one which we see in hindsight won decisively.
In retrospect, the SPE was what you design if you have limited experience with complex memory pipelines and processor cores, and an lack of experience in self-scheduling hardware linking them together. It was then topped off with some strange internal politics and Toshiba's desire for a split-off media processor it could barely find a use for. The harsh lesson in relying on exotica and backwards tools seems to fit with the acceptance at the time for cheap, primitive consumer electronics with limited functionality and closed, proprietary software tools that try to band-aid over glass jaws.

I don't think Sony could maintain the illusion that it really was playing in the same league anymore.
 
There seems to be something special about operating systems, CPU and GPU which are dominated by western companies, while eastern companies are best at all other semi conductors in general, integration and low-level hardware, including discreet semi conductors and passive components.

When Sony reorganized, they said that they'd invest everything on their strength and sell-off or sub-contract anything where they aren't the best in the world. Obviously OS and CPU design wasn't their thing. :D Mobiles and tablets are using Android, the PS4 is using a BSD variant for the OS, Vita was a prowess of integration (wide IO memory) using off-the-shelf CPU and GPU design, it wasn't about silicon design. Laptops, phones and tablets are using standard components, but have an edge in form factor and integration. PS4 has a much smaller form factor than xbone despite 50% higher wattage and integrated power supply.
 
There seems to be something special about operating systems, CPU and GPU which are dominated by western companies, while eastern companies are best at all other semi conductors in general, integration and low-level hardware, including discreet semi conductors and passive components.

When Sony reorganized, they said that they'd invest everything on their strength and sell-off or sub-contract anything where they aren't the best in the world. Obviously OS and CPU design wasn't their thing. :D Mobiles and tablets are using Android, the PS4 is using a BSD variant for the OS, Vita was a prowess of integration (wide IO memory) using off-the-shelf CPU and GPU design, it wasn't about silicon design. Laptops, phones and tablets are using standard components, but have an edge in form factor and integration. PS4 has a much smaller form factor than xbone despite 50% higher wattage and integrated power supply.

Sony still has a very large team working on the PS4 OS in Tokyo.
Just because they started with BSD does not mean there is no work involved in shipping it on a gaming system, all it really does is give them a foundation.
 
Sony still has a very large team working on the PS4 OS in Tokyo.
Just because they started with BSD does not mean there is no work involved in shipping it on a gaming system, all it really does is give them a foundation.

Do tell! :smile:
 
What is there to tell?

As much as possible, for my tastes. I'd love to know if they really are basing it on FreeBSD 9's kernel, if they going to be a contributor to the FreeBSD project, if they're going to support IPv6, if they're going to support DLNA media servers like PS3 does, whether they're going to support an application layer to allow Android apps to be hosted, etc., etc., etc.

At this point, the operating system and software stack is much more fascinating to me (a software engineer) than the hardware, which we appear to know about well enough.
 
Also.. will games on PS4 be scheduled by the default FreeBSD scheduler, or will there be a lighter weight scheduling regime to maximize game performance? Will PS4 have a hypervisor of the sort that PS3 did, or is that no longer necessary due to not attempting to support an 'Other OS' mode?

Will PS4 support paging for non-game apps?

Etc.
 
Sony still has a very large team working on the PS4 OS in Tokyo.
Just because they started with BSD does not mean there is no work involved in shipping it on a gaming system, all it really does is give them a foundation.
ah, thanks. I can imagine there a huge amount of work involved for the entire system. It makes me curious about how much they had to touch the scheduler, the network stack, and the i/o hooks, considering there's a CPU in the south bridge.
 
Watching those two videos, I must say, Mr Cerny got his fingerprints quite visibly all over the place on the video game industry.
And with some successes and failures behind him, it will be interesting to see how the PS4 do.
Could somebody pony up similar info on the person/people behind the X1, would be fun to know the background when watching how the PS4 vs X1 goes in the coming years :)
 
ah, thanks. I can imagine there a huge amount of work involved for the entire system. It makes me curious about how much they had to touch the scheduler, the network stack, and the i/o hooks, considering there's a CPU in the south bridge.

There was some screenshoots posted earlier with the Orbis OS booting, there you could see a ton of what I assume would be modifed libraries being loaded. Things name like SCEEhttps.ko etc (okay I made that one up, but similar to that).

Maybe some of the info you want, can be deduced from those pictures?
 
There was some screenshoots posted earlier with the Orbis OS booting, there you could see a ton of what I assume would be modifed libraries being loaded. Things name like SCEEhttps.ko etc (okay I made that one up, but similar to that).

Maybe some of the info you want, can be deduced from those pictures?

VGLeaks
http://www.vgleaks.com/some-details-about-playstation-4-os-development/

Must have missed these, nothing too remarkable it seems most are just generic libraries. I'm not that familiar with BSD though so I don't recognise '...NpCommon.so','...NpManager.so' or '...lpmi.so'. From context I presume they're just network libraries but I'm just guessing, are they familiar to anyone who knows BSD?
 
I found it self indulgent.

Particularly why he was great for his latest role.
Bullet list of reasons on slide:
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome
- Because I am awesome

Also 'The 3 Musketeers' !? ..... Please!!

Talented guy. Didn't like his presentation style. Didn't have a patch on many of the TED speakers who are genuinely inspiring, and draw the audience in.

But... He is awesome, until this presentation I had the impression he did crash bandicoot and the ps4... Thanks to his impressive awesome list I have an understanding of what makes him tick. And i feel convinced that the classic Sony blunders are gone or kept at a minimum with the ps4. A console aimed at developing games :)
 
VGLeaks
http://www.vgleaks.com/some-details-about-playstation-4-os-development/

Must have missed these, nothing too remarkable it seems most are just generic libraries. I'm not that familiar with BSD though so I don't recognise '...NpCommon.so','...NpManager.so' or '...lpmi.so'. From context I presume they're just network libraries but I'm just guessing, are they familiar to anyone who knows BSD?

I am not familiar at all with BSD, but my assumption was that anything with SCE in it is a Sony lib, either written from scratch or a library that has been modified by Sony. If the later is the case, how easy is it for them to merge in fixes etc from the standard lib when it gets updated.

But not my headache :D Still fun to in very nerdy way ;)
 
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