Mark Cerny "The Road to PS4"

I felt Cerney was giving a lot of credit to Yoshida too. It's like they were building a multi-disciplinary dream team, versus the (alleged) one-man show of Kutaragi in the past. The tone of everything he said was filled with humility about past mistakes, a deep understanding of what they have to focus on this time, it's something rarely seen in business and PR. The slide about "99% hardware 1% software" from the PS3 launch was brutally honest.

 

I think the ps3 post mortem that he mentioned did that. As someone famous said, it's all about developers. And in mark cerny case, it's all about giving them the tools to create games faster and therefore cheaper.

 

But who did the post-mortem, that is the question

 

After listening to him i doubt he wasnt directly involved.He helped cracking Cell,he liked that task,and he founded and promoted the ICE team.Is a person that dedicated a holiday to study what would be possible with a X86 architecture ( in low level ).And he wanted to take spour routines from cell to the PS4 APU.So i would think he was in fact very involved to the ground in the development of the APU and the custom things designed for it.

 

Yes, however, I meant he's not an electrical engineer like Kutatagi was.

 

What exactly is unique about PS4 that Cerny needed to design though? The Onion bus I guess? I think 8 ACE is a part of GCN 2.0. Maybe he was more involved on the graphics driver level.

Looking back on it now it all seems so obvious. And the biggest factor in the overall decision making for system architecture was probably unified memory which devs overwhelmingly gave them the answer to. APU for HSA, yields, and other benefits? Check. Bump up the ratio of GPU to CPU power? Check. Keep it under 150w? Check. Please use the latest GCN improvements. Check. Need high bandwidth? Interface the APU with GDDR5. Check. Oh we have 4gbit GDDR5 chips available now? Bump it to 8GB. Check.

 

I thought the Onion bus and Onion+ bus was standard GCN tech.

 

The onion bus is an APU feature and predates GCN.
The Onion+ hasn't found mention outside of the PS4.

 

Maybe my eyes are blurry but ... Change the terms and Onion+ seems to match up with GCN. *shrug*

 

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).

 

Exactly basically it seems like most enhancements pushed by either company are up to AMD if they want to use it in their PC architectures but not available for the other console platform for obvious reasons.

 

true enough. it is a fairly off the shelf system that it seems like most of us at b3d could have put together.

i think people just think he did such a good job cause it's (at least on surface) more powerful than xb1. but when you think about it, that's more a function of corporate priorities/budget than designer.

although the two can be intertwined i suppose. maybe if cerny was dead set on 4gb being enough for example, then 8gb wouldn't have happened. it's hard to say.

and what if xb1 at the end of the day is outputting games that mostly look as good as what ps4 does, despite 1/3 fewer alu's? will he be such a genius then? or will people be wishing for exotic architectures in playstation again? the full tale hasn't been told yet i guess.

i suppose the other reason for people's praise is that the system seems designed to be very easy to work with, which has been a recent and historic problem for sony especially with ps3.

i do like his idea of a simple system, yet hard to master, and the compute functions/modifications being essentially for those eventually willing to dive really deep.

 

Did some googling. You're right, it's already been discussed on here. Apparently the Volatile tag is already in GCN? http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1729818&postcount=1467. Unknown if GCN 2.0's 8 ACE is a result of Sony's idea rather than vice versa though.

By Gispel:

 

I would boil it down to philosophy of design is more important than actual design. Soliciting feedback from developers and listening to what they want. He said he was surprised when developers didn't want "more power" or "more RAM", but "less exotic" was the overwhelming top priority, which of he was surprised still by that, one wonders what would have been designed in a closed room. Granted, they ended up getting the first two anyway, but that was just luck from a 3rd party dev standpoint. No developer was relying on the PS4 having 8GB of RAM last December.

 

Agreed. But actually what the devs told him was, make it as powerful as you can, no limits It was too obvious of an answer so he asked more specific questions. The key takeaway though was unified memory. Then the GPU to CPU power ratio should be bigger. And then later, more memory, via Pitchford and others I guess.

 

and then economic and engineering reality set in, and both consoles ended up with 1.6 ghz jaguars

 

I thought volatile tag was in GCN by that Gipsel post but now if 3dcgi,that designed some of the modifications of the APU, says that is a Sony thing like the 8 ACES i will change my mind and believe him.

 

Indeed, I think he states at some point that the choice of the ISA decides who you work with, which process you uses, etc.
Jaguar cores are the best cores money can buy and that are produced using TSMC process. Low clock streamrollers could have been an option if AMD had been in time (applies to both MSFT and Sony).

 

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.

 

Meh... i don't think anyone here would want an airy and whispy speech devoid of all technical info.