News and Rumours: PS4

[Arwin]

Note that my assumption for the requirements of SPEs in the PS4 is because I doubt that software emulation of that component would be possible by almost any other hardware. If the chips in the PS4 can emulate this in software, then obviously they'll go for that instead. For now however I'm assuming that the local store setup for SPEs is near impossible to emulate at relevant speeds and latency. On the other hand what XDR or the PPE brought to the PS4 I think is more likely to find a better version in the PS4 anyway that may emulate that part of the Cell. But we'll see, I'm not even close to an expert.

 

[Brad Grenz]

8 SPEs would be really small at 28nm and AMD's original vision for Fusion wasn't just about integrating GPU shaders. Having a block of SPEs on die with 4 Steamroller modules seems feasible, if AMD has been contracted for that much work. Even if devs don't want to use them directly, Sony could leverage them at the OS level for video encoding/decoding and scaling, surround sound audio rendering, image processing for the next gen PS Eye/Move, post processing effects, security and potentially physics. And that's on top of providing backwards compatibility with the PPE emulated by the x64 cores. Not as cool as that 64 SPE monster I've been dreaming of, but certainly a best of both worlds scenario where game developers benefit from the raw SPE power without ever programming them directly.

 

[Gitaroo]

yeah, basically use the extra cell processor as a third hand for video play back (decoding 4K bluray?), handling audio, image processing for vita connectivity or if the system is going to have some sort of tablet screen output like wii U, video chat for every game? Physx? capture replay and youtube upload for every game? And backward compatibility on top of all that. Maybe it can handle all the background OS and leave the rest of the resources free for developers to the dev. If the system is going to have less ram than the next xbox, say 2 gigs, cant they have XDR ram for the cell and only use all that for the OS and leave as much as possible for the developers? Assuming that the PS3 production would still continue after PS4 launch, it won't be the only device that uses it. I am not an engineer, so I don't really understand the complexity of including the Cell + XDR memory in these rumor specs.....

 

[Dregun]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the huge impact (as in complete destroyal) of the rental business if console manufacturers institute New used game policies.

Back in 2005 I laid out an idea how both ms and Sony could create their own used game business Unfortunately a search of the forums shows 2005 is the farthest the database goes back. And goozex was started a year later...doh!

My idea was simple, use live and psn to allow people to trade in their games for credit to their account. They would then have access to "used" games to buy at discounted prices via download or mail. Sony and ms could just deactivate the disc once it's sold to them and that brings 1 used game into the pool to be bought. The end user doesn't have to mail the disc, they can just destroy it themselves.

My biggest gripe is instead of trying to compete in the used game market they are choosing to destroy it. If they compete EVERYONE wins. Plus this would give developers an idea how good or bad their game is by seeing the used market fully.

Taking away my ability to rent and borrow games is very saddening to me as I do that often. My friends and I like similar games and we trade/borrow to eachother all the time. Hell I'm the only one if the 4 of us who plays online.

If Sony or ms creates their own used game service they will take out gamestop easily that way, no need to play dirty and at least this way some devs and publishers can see how shitty the public views some of thier games.

Imagine selling your MW5 game back to Sony or Ms after a month for 30 bucks that gets automatically deposited to your account. You can choose how you want to spend that money. Yet later that day some bloke wants a copy of MW5 and sees one is available used for 40 bucks if they download it or 45 if they want a disc mailed. Developer made some profit.

They can also update game values in real time and since they know when greatest hits will be released before anyone else they can modify the payed out value for used games plenty early enough as to prevent declined profits from it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the huge impact (as in complete destroyal) of the rental business if console manufacturers institute New used game policies.

My biggest gripe is instead of trying to compete in the used game market they are choosing to destroy it. If they compete EVERYONE wins. Plus this would give developers an idea how good or bad their game is by seeing the used market fully.

Hold your horses. People haven't mentioned it (or at least, those talking about it were talking about the ethics and it was moved here) because, at the moment, they aren't doing anything. We have a rumour that has been denied by Sony, so presently there is no used-market impact. It's business as usual until shown otherwise.

 

[piSquaredOverSix]

dammit. i wanted 32 spus and 4 power 7 based ppus and a kepler gpu

 

[Acert93]

I was reading in another thread that tied into this one about areas where the PS2 could do some things better than RSX. There was a response of... I guess you could call it resentment, fear even, of Sony moving away from their own architectures. I think Shifty's example is what you would call a "corner case." And certainly, if the PS4 uses an x86 (-64) architecture, or even a PPC based one, there will be situations where the Cell is better. But I don't think in general anyone wants to swap out RSX for PS2 hardware nor will a competent (assumption) PS4 design make the people making and developing PS4's yearn for the ol' days of Cell. And it will be eye rolling worthy when people take the examples where Cell bests modern console CPUs and lament people denigrating Cell's weaknesses because of areas of excellence. Industries move on, needs change, new hardware does things differently and more efficient ways.

The enthusiasts who are not programming these consoles nor the ones funding the projects. From those perspectives there is a large benefit to finding a common ground, even synergy, with the PC market. It strikes deeply into an area where MS has traditionally had a developer advantage and it puts Sony in a strong position to be the "lead" platform due to the PC/PS4 install base. Because developing for a rumored "AMD x86 + South Island DX11-class GPU" is developing for a PC. Sony could leverage a crazy amount of experience and development tools, mature software stacks and compilers, and robust middleware and hit their launch with the wheels rolling. If they want to throw something "sexy" in for the enthusiasts all they need do is pitch the platform as emphasizing GPGPU -- if Cell was a "stream processors" then a GPGPU centric design would be a "super stream processor"

I really don't know what people want/expect. The writing was on the wall when Cell failed to get significant adoption outside the PS3 and it was pretty clear when IBM turned their nose elsewhere and Sony told a ton of fab space to Toshiba that Sony themselves considered their efforts of lacking the value they needed in return. It is easy to "fear" Sony moving to a competing product and see it as being false to their entrepreneurial past, making bold moves, but if those moves were so great in the sense of a total product they would have continued on with them. The market obviously has a strong emphasis on Indie (a 8 SPE design doesn't scream accessible to Indie developers imo, let alone a 32 SPE one) and the major studios are looking at 2 year turn around on major franchises. They want to leverage resources. Is a console about giving developers what they want and ask for or to build the absolutely best piece of kit possible? In some ways a console maker does need to have an eye toward the future as well as an ear to consumers, feet to the ground on the bill of goods, and a willingness to be bold and do things different. But that cannot come at the complete cost of the publishers and developers. And I am certain they are hearing that publishers have no interest in 3 "distinct" platforms.

Sony, if the AMD rumor is true, is moving in a direction publishers can really get behind. Sony already allows HDD upgrades, PC wheels and sticks, etc. By moving toward an "AMD Console" and, say, supporting more Steam integration, Sony is not only hitting the hard core market hard they are also making it easy for those cutting edge PC developers to fully embrace Sony's vision. If consoles are about the great software that can be made by great developers Sony making moves to expand their market and making their platform more friendly should be cheered, not eye with disgruntled eyes looking at bygone years as if they have much relevance on today's market.

 

[wco81]

Sony better get a hell of a deal from AMD. Now they have a weak x86 CPU and they won't get the hype that the Cell and the EE did at the time of their debuts. The Cell was potentially a new architecture to take over all manner of consumer electronics. Of course that didn't pan out but the hype was up there -- turns out ARM may be that architecture taking over consumer electronics.

But if it helps them hit a very competitive price target, that may be a good tradeoff. If they can produce a $400 console at launch which is near break even or even a bit profitable, that is.

 

[liolio]

That is quiet a statement to do. A weak X86 cpu... the 360 has a really weak POWERPC cpu and bested the ps3 in quiet some games this gen.

It's better to look at things this way: the 360 and the ps3 were a wash this gen. The 360 achieved that with a weak cpu. As Sony might move to a standard SMP cpu for all intend and purpose the 360 is a better point of comparison looking forward than the ps3.

Even bulldozer modules as they are ( things can get better with piledriver) would litterally fly around Xenon in real world perfs, even using only two modules. So clearly weak cpu is quiet a stretch to describe bd performances.

 

[wco81]

I meant weak in comparison to what else is going to be out there by the time this console launches.

The Cell and Xenon were exotic compared to the Intel and AMD processors around at the time.

But when it launches in 2013 or 2014, using an AMD CPU won't have that mystique, especially since AMD is an also-ran in the CPU business and would likely be dead without this deal with Sony.

 

[AlphaWolf]

What does exotic or mystique get you? What % of console owners buy the product because of those traits existing in the CPU? I expect you could tell the majority of the public they were putting a MOS Technology 6510 in the next gen and they wouldn't care as long as the results looked good. It might make forum discussions a bit less exciting, but the end product won't suffer from lack of exotic.

 

[wco81]

It was harder to hide the performance relative to PCs with exotic architecture.

Now, if they use a pedestrian CPU, and a low-rent one at that, it won't be so easy.

Not saying it would be the wrong move, especially if it helps them make a more competitive product.

 

[Acert93]

This is exactly what I am talking about. OOOe CPUs aren't sexy and actual real world code performance "across the board" and cost of implementation don't translate as well to power point slides as FLOPs.

And Xenon was hardly "exotic" compared to contemporary Intel and AMD dual core CPUs of the time. I am not sure a recycled and re-purposed VMX units in Xenon counts as exotic. Xenon was chosen party due to cost but also because you could get 3 cores (6 total threads) and 1MB of L2 into a an area on 90nm that was about 50% less than the X2. That being said I am sure a lot of developers would have still preferred an X2. Sure, it doesn't do a peak ~ 80 GFLOPs, have 6 hardware threads, 128 bit register, etc all the sexy stuff to throw up on a power point but in terms of quickly executing code an X2 was a really good processor for the time.

 

[Acert93]

It was harder to hide the performance relative to PCs with exotic architecture.

Now, if they use a pedestrian CPU, and a low-rent one at that, it won't be so easy.

Not saying it would be the wrong move, especially if it helps them make a more competitive product.

Well at the beginning of the gen Cell wasn't doing much to close that gap at all!

And as the generation matured Cell has been shown to be kind of redundant as many of the tasks people are throwing at it are things that are GPU/GPGPUs type tasks that modern GPUs can do nearly as well (if not a lot better). Whether you call it Cell giving a roadmap for GPUs or GPUs eating Cell's lunch it makes a lot of sense to have the "Next-Gen" product do the CPU things that Cell sucked on a modern CPU that does those things *lot better* and the GPU/GPGPU things that Cell was doing well moved over to more robust GPUs that have a much higher performance/mm^2.

Or put another way: MS's next console and the PC will be certainly leveraging GPGPU. And developers like CPUs that allow them to get code up quickly, is easy to maintain, and performs poor code quickly.

Going exotic, e.g. a very heavy Cell design and forging a GPGPU focus and easy-to-use-but-fast CPUs, isn't going to win Sony many favors. And that doesn't even engage would it be better/faster.

As for the modern PC market: Intel and AMD are packing the majority of their high end consumer CPUs with half their area with GPUs.

If you consider the prospect of a lean CPU (e.g. reduced caches) and no ondie GPU it won't be hard for Sony get get an x86 CPU from AMD that outpaces 90% of their consumer CPUs hitting the market at the time of release. Considering PC games need to account for at least a 2 year lag in hardware (e.g. a 2012 game needs to run on 2010 hardware) it is not hard to see how Sony's approach would not mean the PC market would automatically run away. In fact it would do the opposite: it would spur on the PC market to embrace multicore more fully, set a lower bound baseline for what is acceptable on the PC, etc. This would take years before that became the baseline of development. Years where PS3 developers could really be pushing the closed box. There is a lot to be said to developing to a spec (e.g. 720p at 30Hz) on fixed hardware. PC gamers work on a different model e.g. how many are happy if the 7970 GCN or 680 Kepler run Crysis at 720p at 30Hz? Noooo!!! They want 3-4MP resolutions with 4xMSAA at 60Hz! So even as the PC market pulls away--inevitable, but also inevitably slower--what you will have for a good 4 years is titles pushing the PS4 to the max at 720p 30Hz and the PC folks ticking a couple extra boxes, getting 4MP or even 8MP resolutions, at 60Hz (or 120Hz), crazy MSAA amounts, etc. The market financially won't be able to support PC titles not doing this and whatever you could do on a PC at 3MP at 60Hz 3 years after the PS4 launched could be done at 1MP at 30Hz with same features.

And as I mentioned, the PC market has slowed in terms of raw performance jumps. (All this assuming the PS4 is not the WiiU's ugly long lost cousin).

 

[AlphaWolf]

It was harder to hide the performance relative to PCs with exotic architecture.

Now, if they use a pedestrian CPU, and a low-rent one at that, it won't be so easy.

Not saying it would be the wrong move, especially if it helps them make a more competitive product.

If the end result looks good, no one will care. I don't recall any of the current consoles being marketed on their FLOPS. Yes it was discussed at places like this, but it's not going to matter to most consumers. They just don't care.

 

[Prophecy2k]

That is quiet a statement to do. A weak X86 cpu... the 360 has a really weak POWERPC cpu and bested the ps3 in quiet some games this gen.

It's better to look at things this way: the 360 and the ps3 were a wash this gen. The 360 achieved that with a weak cpu. As Sony might move to a standard SMP cpu for all intend and purpose the 360 is a better point of comparison looking forward than the ps3.

Even bulldozer modules as they are ( things can get better with piledriver) would litterally fly around Xenon in real world perfs, even using only two modules. So clearly weak cpu is quiet a stretch to describe bd performances.

One thing to note though is that the more relevant comparison will not be between PS4's rumoured x86 cpu and Xenon, but PS4's rumoured x86 cpu and Durango's PPC (possibly Power 7-based) multicore IBM cpu.

I'm curious as to what the next-box IBM cpu will be like and how it would compare against a possible PS4 x86 cpu?

Perhaps anyone with a greater knowledge of the two architectures, and what might be reasonably feasible for the next-gen boxes (based on a realitic power and silicon budget) might be able to chime in with a hypthetical comparison of performance between two suggested chips?

*Lays down the gauntlet*

 

[Brad Grenz]

I agree, though we haven't been given any indication as to the specific PowerPC design in use. If there is any veracity to the pastebin's specs, I think that points to 8 very simple cores with 2 way SMT. Very probably that would just be 8 of the same in order cores the 360 uses.

That would give us around 250 gigaflops. I think that's maybe a little better than a 4 module bulldozer derivative. Of course, the AMD part would destroy it in other ways.

In that case the IBM CPU would be quite a bit smaller, though. It would make sense if we believe the chip is already in production as a single chip with a 6670 level GPU. It would be comparable to the high end Llano in size. But that doesn't scream high performance like some rumors claim. Its more in line with the rumors suggesting the 720 is a pretty modest bump.

 

[V3]

I agree, though we haven't been given any indication as to the specific PowerPC design in use. If there is any veracity to the pastebin's specs, I think that points to 8 very simple cores with 2 way SMT. Very probably that would just be 8 of the same in order cores the 360 uses.

That would give us around 250 gigaflops. I think that's maybe a little better than a 4 module bulldozer derivative. Of course, the AMD part would destroy it in other ways.

In that case the IBM CPU would be quite a bit smaller, though. It would make sense if we believe the chip is already in production as a single chip with a 6670 level GPU. It would be comparable to the high end Llano in size. But that doesn't scream high performance like some rumors claim. Its more in line with the rumors suggesting the 720 is a pretty modest bump.

Beside something like FX-8150 is overkill for PS4 anyway. Something like FX-4100 is probably more like it, pair with HD7870 with 2GB of GDDR5. Perhaps they can include the good old Cell as physics processor and an upscaler/video processor as well as BC.

If Sony is serious about 4k, they'll need something like HD7990, GPU.

 

[Megadrive1988]

http://ht.ly/a1pXW

Mon, Apr 02, 2012 | 14:18 BST
PlayStation 4: Sony “confident” of pre-Xbox 720 release


VG247 has been told that Sony is aiming to release PlayStation 4 before Xbox 720 next Christmas, and that certain developers have been invited to reveal meetings in the US in May and June.



“Sony are completely in the belief that they have the jump on Microsoft this time. You should be watching the timing of next year’s E3 keynotes, and who’s going to go first.”
Following continued reports last week that PlayStation 4 is to be based on AMD hardware and is being planned for a 2013 release, a VG247 source has said Sony is aiming to get the machine to market ahead of Microsoft’s next generation Xbox.

The design goalposts for PS4, including specs, were in place at least two years ago, we were told. Our source said that Sony is “confident” it will have the console at market ahead of the next generation Xbox next Christmas.

VG247 reported this morning that developers and publishers have been told that Xbox 720 will be released for Holiday 2013.

“Sony are completely in the belief that they have the jump on Microsoft this time,” they said. “You should be watching the timing of next year’s E3 keynotes, and who’s going to go first.”[b/]

A second source said this morning that all next-generation systems will be in place “by 2014″.

Sony has apparently already put its favoured partners in the frame as to PlayStation 4.

“Top line publishers already know about it,” our source said. “Developers working with publishers – like Ubisoft, for example – already know what’s going on. They’re already working on it.”

While “most developers” will be fully briefed “by the end of this year,” some have been invited to events in May and June in the US.

Another source has told us more information is going to be issued about PS4 to developers under NDA in May.

MCV reported earlier this year that both PS4 and Xbox 720 “will be shown at E3 2012,” but both Microsoft and Sony have both said nothing consumer-facing about the next generation will happen at the LA event this year.

Direct to drive

In addition, a rumour is circulating that PlayStation 4 will use DirectX as opposed to a proprietary Sony API. It was reported last week that PlayStation 4 will not be based on PS3′s Cell processor in any way, and will instead use standard AMD hardware.

We were told today that Crytek was scaling its tech on the assumption that PS4 was going to be using a 24-core Cell processor as opposed to the eight-core unit in PS3. The studio was forced to halt development and start afresh when it was informed PlayStation 4 won’t be using Cell at all.

Indications are that PlayStation 4 will provide a development environment similar to that of the Xbox consoles and PC.

In addition VG247 has been told that elements of Vita’s launch hardware were changed to ensure that PS4 and Vita will be able to connect in a similar style to Nintendo’s Wii U and its controller – due for release this year – with Vita’s being used to control PS4 games with both twin sticks and touch.

 

[babybumb]

"We were told today.."

VG247 postings screams that they are printing stories that come from one source and just run with it.