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

[ERP]

Yes I've read the slides and I know Laurent.
There is a DSP in the audio hardware, and I had little contact with the groups doing voice recognition.
However there were various "bugs" in the speech recognition code in earlier OS releases that lead me to believe there is a significant CPU component to it.

 

[-tkf-]

Yes I've read the slides and I know Laurent.
There is a DSP in the audio hardware, and I had little contact with the groups doing voice recognition.
However there were various "bugs" in the speech recognition code in earlier OS releases that lead me to believe there is a significant CPU component to it.

When you stream live with the camera enabled the voice control is apparently disabled, so resources are not endless.

 

[patsu]

It's not additional hardware we know that there is the secondary chip & the media accelerators we just don't know everything that they are doing.


My theory is that the media accelerators/ ACP is the DPU from Tensilica which is programmable & might help the CPU/GPU out a lot by taking the load off of them.


The ACP could be on the APU,secondary chip or the mystery chip I don't know but we know it's there & we know that a lot of the PS4 OS functions are handled in hardware, Remote Play , gameplay recording \live streaming , voice recognition \ voice chat & other stuff.

The reported Tensilica stuff can only be programmed by Sony. The developers call the audio services API to use the h/w.

At this point, we don't know the dynamic behavior of the existing building blocks. Number of reserved cores and size of memory reserved only give a rather static picture. During run-time, there may be overheads, contentions and requirements that need to be addressed as well. I assume the developers are learning at this point. Once they understand the run-time behavior, they should be able to use the memory and ACEs more effectively.

I don't know if they need more computation power per se. One Sony developer was saying many companies he visited can hit their targets without the ICE team's help now. They should be able to do more once they master the GPGPU. Cerny estimated 3 years although a few first parties are starting to do more interesting things on the GPU.

 

[patsu]

Yes I've read the slides and I know Laurent.
There is a DSP in the audio hardware, and I had little contact with the groups doing voice recognition.
However there were various "bugs" in the speech recognition code in earlier OS releases that lead me to believe there is a significant CPU component to it.

What kind of bugs ? The ACP may be used for echo cancelation and lower level speech processing, but the CPU may handle integration and dictionary related tasks.

 

[onQ]

The reported Tensilica stuff can only be programmed by Sony. The developers call the audio services API to use the h/w.

At this point, we don't know the dynamic behavior of the existing building blocks. Number of reserved cores and size of memory reserved only give a rather static picture. During run-time, there may be overheads, contentions and requirements that need to be addressed as well. I assume the developers are learning at this point. Once they understand the run-time behavior, they should be able to use the memory and ACEs more effectively.

I don't know if they need more computation power per se. One Sony developer was saying many companies he visited can hit their targets without the ICE team's help now. They should be able to do more once they master the GPGPU. Cerny estimated 3 years although a few first parties are starting to do more interesting things on the GPU.

Of course it's not programmable by the game devs but the more Sony use the ACP for the less the CPU\GPU has to do. If it's something that they know most\every game is going to use they can probably make it a part of a fixed pipeline.

 

[patsu]

Of course it's not programmable by the game devs but the more Sony use the ACP for the less the CPU\GPU has to do. If it's something that they know most\every game is going to use they can probably make it a part of a fixed pipeline.

It may not be that simple. e.g., In the HSA audio programming slides, they note that the ACP may not be suitable for low latency audio tasks.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's not hard to prove at all, I'm very surprised I'm first who came up with Power/LED management...

The IC is a standard PQFP or variant thereof, with internal wire-bonding to the chip (IE, no particularly high data rate signalling etc), no notable power delivery circuitry nearby or any cooling measures of any kind (not even a passive heatsink) etc...

That's the sort of informed logical disproof needed to be presented. Now the ball is in onQ's court, if he's not going to accept these observations, to explain how the package and tracks and layout are supportive of a high-performance device. If there's no technical response, the discussion strikes me as suitably solved within the constraints of deductive reasoning across the B3D gestalt of knowledge - it's a simple controller chip.

 

[imaxx]

there is encryption hardware

...?????

Though I think exceptions were made for the decompression hardware.

...nah. Why would you put direct register controls in the UMD, risking way more than you might even benefit from?

 

[fxtech]

hi all , any idea of the performance of the zlib hw ? is it also able to do compressione task ? i really hoped for an hw implementation of LZ4 , it is blazing fast for that tipe of task and it support also direct stream

http://fastcompression.blogspot.it/p/lz4.html

 

[scf]

UK development studio nDreams has today announced development on a PlayStation 4 exclusive title. Very few details are available at present though the team promise that more will be revealed in the new year.

“I’m delighted to be able to officially announce that we are working on a PlayStation 4 title, which will launch in 2014.” States nDreams CEO Patrick O’Luanaigh in an open letter. “More details will follow next year, but it’s the most ambitious game we have ever created, and we can’t wait to reveal more about it – it’s going to be something truly special.”

nDreams has previously found success on PlayStation Home, delivering content to a very concentrated audience. The team also have mobile titles and Oculus Rift projects in the pipeline for 2014, and Electronic Theatre will keep you updated on all of these and other titles from nDreams.

 

[patsu]

UK development studio nDreams has today announced development on a PlayStation 4 exclusive title. Very few details are available at present though the team promise that more will be revealed in the new year.

“I’m delighted to be able to officially announce that we are working on a PlayStation 4 title, which will launch in 2014.” States nDreams CEO Patrick O’Luanaigh in an open letter. “More details will follow next year, but it’s the most ambitious game we have ever created, and we can’t wait to reveal more about it – it’s going to be something truly special.”

nDreams has previously found success on PlayStation Home, delivering content to a very concentrated audience. The team also have mobile titles and Oculus Rift projects in the pipeline for 2014, and Electronic Theatre will keep you updated on all of these and other titles from nDreams.

Should be in the PS4 News & Rumors thread in the main Console forum.

nDreams made the Xi ARG game in PS Home, plus many Home Spaces.

Full letter is here:
http://s3.ndreams.com/Stakeholder2013.pdf

Looks like they are diving into VR starting next year.

 

[scf]

teardown by iFixit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JAhv9Ed-N4

 

[Grall]

Teardown of what, PS4? We had those already, a month and a half ago.

 

[scf]

Teardown of what, PS4? We had those already, a month and a half ago.

We had, but not by iFixit. And no, I don't try to say that their teardown is something special

 

[loekf]

We had, but not by iFixit. And no, I don't try to say that their teardown is something special

Thought it was done by Ifixit already ? Or was that the XB1 ?

Useless teardown, and is that guy really the "CEO" (WTF ?) of Ifixit ? He seemed to be a bit clueless to me...

 

[Grall]

Ahem... Ifixit published their teardown on launch day IIRC. Maybe not on youtube, but on their site.

 

[Cyan]

teardown by iFixit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JAhv9Ed-N4

The bearded guy is very much alike the Top Gear USA guy --I mean the chubby one who wears glasses.

The internal power brick got my attention, now I know where many of the the vents in the rear of the console come from. It also got my attention how different PS4 and Xbox One's motherboards are.

 

[DieH@rd]

New VR news coming out of Steam Dev Days
http://thesonicreblog.com/yes-playstation-vr-not-hmz/

The devs I spoke to talked about the actual PlayStation vr headset.They described super stardust vr to me and explicitly talked about how it was different than the hmz line. Sony has been working on vr for ages, longer than people realize. They’re pretty thrilled to see vr taking off just as their tech is maturing and are interested in the long-term future of the medium, but just their own headset

 

[JPT]

Super Stardust VR?!?!?!!? Who needs heroin, thats all I got to say on that subject.....

 

[macabre]

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