Pondering The Top Technical Innovations of the Playstation 4

The 4k video output is a pretty big headline feature - it may not be a big gaming feature (they'renot rendering at 4k) but it could well prompt a large number of sales in the home theatre market.

(A decent number of PS3 sales were probably swung because it gave access to a decent bluray player).
 
A single Jaguar core could composite 100s of sound sources and HRTF filter them and it probably still wouldn't exceed 10% of it's processing time ... what's the use of a dedicated audio processor?

May be running voice apps in parallel without affecting gaming performance ?
 
Didn't bkilian mention that some audio work can be very taxing? Stuff like background separation and voice location detection etc.?
 
Does ultrasonic processing count as audio work ? Using ultrasonic sensors to model the living room might be interesting too.
 
Didn't bkilian mention that some audio work can be very taxing? Stuff like background separation and voice location detection etc.?

Go ask a sound designer what's required for a single High Quality reverb.
Audio will eat as many CPU cycles as you allocate to it, where the point of diminishing returns is, is somewhat debatable.
 
Sure. And you can take it further - I remember that Uncharted 2 talk was discussing that they were using basic sound occlusion algorithms using SPEs, which I would imagine could work very similar to raycasting work using CUs? So eventually it will start to make more sense to fully integrate some of that stuff in the graphics and physics engine pipelines.

But yeah, it shouldn't be a huge surprise to see some dedicated hardware in there.
 
Rumors have said 1.6GHz CPU clock. Cache is presumably around 256k/core at most, considering there's 8 of them and sharing die with the GPU - so no going overboard with SRAM... Maybe 256k shared between pairs of cores. *shrug* Jaguar is an el cheapo laptop CPU IIRC, so no need to throw pearls before swine; it'll be a fairly small L2 for sure.

No. Let's say 1.8GHz vanilla (2.1GHz / WPC) and 2MB shared L2 per CU. But that's my rumor... ;)
 
Rumors have said 1.6GHz CPU clock. Cache is presumably around 256k/core at most, considering there's 8 of them and sharing die with the GPU - so no going overboard with SRAM... Maybe 256k shared between pairs of cores. *shrug* Jaguar is an el cheapo laptop CPU IIRC, so no need to throw pearls before swine; it'll be a fairly small L2 for sure.
Following up to MikeR. Jaguar CPU cores come in modules with 4 cores and L2 cache shared between these 4 cores. This L2 measures 2 MB. That is verly likely fixed for Jaguar. And you wouldn't save much area going to a smaller L2 cache anyway. Each single CU of the graphics part contains ~350kB of SRAM. It wouldn't make sense at all to gimp the CPU cores with only 256kB cache per core. So the PS4 has 2 x 2MB L2 cache for the CPU cores for sure.
 
Following up to MikeR. Jaguar CPU cores come in modules with 4 cores and L2 cache shared between these 4 cores. This L2 measures 2 MB. That is verly likely fixed for Jaguar. And you wouldn't save much area going to a smaller L2 cache anyway. Each single CU of the graphics part contains ~350kB of SRAM. It wouldn't make sense at all to gimp the CPU cores with only 256kB cache per core. So the PS4 has 2 x 2MB L2 cache for the CPU cores for sure.

Bingo! :smile:
 
I've been doing some research on the PS4, the AMD 7850, and other topics. I have came to a conclusion about the PS4.

Unless it has at least one more innovation as significant as the 8 gigs of GDDR5, it is not going to be very different from a gaming PC you could build for 500 dollars or so. It's not going to be pushing any limits or doing anything -- other than the 8 gigs of RAM -- overly innovative.

-- It's not going to be able to push truly photorealistic graphics.

-- It's not going to make games that look better than Crysis 3 on a high end gaming PC at maximum settings.

However, for those who do not care about near photorealistic graphics, it is going to be a dream machine.

-- It will produce games that match anything on the PC today (at least at 720P).
-- It will have huge levels.
-- It will have all sorts of things (such as motion sensing and the camera).

For the rest of us, we will have to wait until the PS5.

However, I'm hoping that the PS4 has at least one more huge innovation.
 
I've been doing some research on the PS4, the AMD 7850, and other topics. I have came to a conclusion about the PS4.

Unless it has at least one more innovation as significant as the 8 gigs of GDDR5, it is not going to be very different from a gaming PC you could build for 500 dollars or so. It's not going to be pushing any limits or doing anything -- other than the 8 gigs of RAM -- overly innovative.

-- It's not going to be able to push truly photorealistic graphics.

-- It's not going to make games that look better than Crysis 3 on a high end gaming PC at maximum settings.

However, for those who do not care about near photorealistic graphics, it is going to be a dream machine.

-- It will produce games that match anything on the PC today (at least at 720P).
-- It will have huge levels.
-- It will have all sorts of things (such as motion sensing and the camera).

For the rest of us, we will have to wait until the PS5.

However, I'm hoping that the PS4 has at least one more huge innovation.

What did you expect from a ~200W 2013 console? :???:
 
What did you expect from a ~200W 2013 console? :???:

First of all, consoles do not have to be limited to 200 watts. They could go up higher than that. I'm thinking 300 watts would not be too challenging to deal with. All you would need is a better cooling solution and a larger case.

I was really hoping for a game system that...

1) Had a GPU roughly equivalent to a GTX 680 (maybe downclocked a little to reduce heat).

2) Had a decent CPU.

3) Had at least 4 or more gigs of fast RAM.

4) Had a couple really neat innovations that would make it competitive with PCs.

What we got was a system with a fairly weak GPU (of course much more powerful than the PS3), a sorta decent CPU (I was not overly concerned with the CPU), lots and lots of RAM, and a few modifications that may or may not be significant.

Personally, I wish Sony would have saved all the money used on the controller, the motion sensing, and the camera and put it all towards the GPU. Personally, I like the idea of them putting a weak GPU on the APU (for compute) and then having a discrete GPU.

Like I said before, the PS4 is going to be a great system for those people who do not care about near photorealistic games. However, for anyone with the hope that a game might look like a TV show, the PS4 is a let down.
 
I think PS4 is going have a dedicated chip for audio.

In regards to the PS4, I am curious about the new technologies such hardware can produce or what innovative ways developers can find to create new techniques.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel, sure, but there is so much room left for improvement now that they know what the hardware is going to be.

I am 99% certain it has an audio chip :)
 
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