News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

[patsu]

That would be nice, although it would be a cost adder.

Yap, that’s why I’m taking a wait-n-see stand on the Flash RAM rumor.

I had an idea a while back before the disclosure of the Other Stuff processor and mechanical storage that the discussions of an ARM background processor could mean a somewhat over-engineered SSD controller, since those are ARM processors anyway.
The flash storage, standby networking, and background processing could come in a neat package.

Yesh~ using the ARM core for background upload/download seems wasteful. There should be other OS-related uses. Hopefully not over-engineered approach but simple and provable improvements.

 

[3dilettante]

Yesh~ using the ARM core for background upload/download seems wasteful. There should be other OS-related uses. Hopefully not over-engineered approach but simple and provable improvements.

Sony already stated there is a separate processor, so the waste is already present.
Fast SSDs already have multicore ARM processors that manage their own RAM, run their own firmware, and handle very fast data transfers and storage management. Aside from giving the controller the ability to interface with the networking hardware, they do a decent amount all on their own.

There are ARM9 variants in SSDs, and ARM9 variants in networked media devices, hence why I wondered if the storage controller could do double duty.

I'm uncertain as to how tightly interconnected the x86 side and ARM side would be. The x86 side would try to avoid too many system calls that involve the ARM since that would increase the time it takes to peform OS calls, and they wouldn't handle memory or paging in the same way.
The exception would be traffic typical of what would come from writing to disk or the network, since there's frequently an ARM chip operating with its own little embedded system on the other end of those transactions anyway. That's a bit more stand-off than running shared OS routines.

 

[jgp]

Pretty sure PS4 will require mandatory full installs. Sony would be stupid to allow streaming games of a BD disk at this point.

Every PS4 SKU will come with at least a 500GB HDD.

This. After all, you've got to have somewhere to download your 100GB+ 4K movies to!

Sony already stated there is a separate processor, so the waste is already present.
Fast SSDs already have multicore ARM processors that manage their own RAM, run their own firmware, and handle very fast data transfers and storage management. Aside from giving the controller the ability to interface with the networking hardware, they do a decent amount all on their own.

There are ARM9 variants in SSDs, and ARM9 variants in networked media devices, hence why I wondered if the storage controller could do double duty.

I'm uncertain as to how tightly interconnected the x86 side and ARM side would be. The x86 side would try to avoid too many system calls that involve the ARM since that would increase the time it takes to peform OS calls, and they wouldn't handle memory or paging in the same way.
The exception would be traffic typical of what would come from writing to disk or the network, since there's frequently an ARM chip operating with its own little embedded system on the other end of those transactions anyway. That's a bit more stand-off than running shared OS routines.

This bit here is strange -- I mean, the mysterious companion chip.

For one, for instant wake-up, they must keep some parts of the main chip alive to refresh the RAM (or does it have self-refresh?), or else we'll suffer for ~80s while the beast fills the 8GB RAM from the hard disk at 100MB/s.

For another, an ARM core can be so small that nobody will find it mixed in with the Jaguar and GCN cores (rumors have it that Trinity has one on-chip, although not-currently-used, and nobody found out from the chip's shots).

This means the "mysterious chip sauce" could be embedded in the main chip, just power off the CPU & GPU cores, keep the memory controller live to refresh the RAM but power down the links when not used, would have access to the RAM and disk/network if it's integrated or via the southbridge link, etc. And it could double as the security processor, too, and HSA would marry everything together harmoniously.

File system access could also be regulated by this "core" too, to avoid corruption, etc (kind of like NFS, i.e., a remote file system access protocol).

 

[patsu]

I think it is part of the APU based on AMD and ARM’s TrustZone deal.

I’m just wondering why they bother to customize it, and what else it is used for. There was a loose rumor that says PS4 does not do TrustZone. If true, the ARM unit is basically freed up to do whatever Sony want. Disclaimer: it’s a piece of unattributed info.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see Mark Cerny acknowledge the secondary custom chip and highlight background download/upload as its features.

 

[patsu]

Pretty sure PS4 will require mandatory full installs. Sony would be stupid to allow streaming games of a BD disk at this point.

Every PS4 SKU will come with at least a 500GB HDD.

How fast does the install take ?

 

[MrFox]

Pretty sure PS4 will require mandatory full installs. Sony would be stupid to allow streaming games of a BD disk at this point.

Every PS4 SKU will come with at least a 500GB HDD.

Not allowing to play the game from the BR disc would be the antithesis of Mark Cerny's vision presented at the press conference.
Install while playing, caching ODD to HDD, partial installs, and optional full install are more likely. And if I can play while it install, it's obviously not a mandatory full install.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

How fast does the install take ?

It doesn't matter.

It only has to install a small bit before you can start playing the game. While playing, the game will be continuing the installation in the background.

If they do it properly, the first time you start a game should be as fast or faster than the old method of loading data from the optical drive. Subsequent game starts should be significantly faster.

In other words, unless they screw it up, the worst case scenario will still have you in and playing games in the same amount of time as it took on PS3. And that's only the first time. After that it will always be faster.

Well, unless we see an 8-16x increase (or more) in the data assets required. In which case it may be slower but be glad you wouldn't have to load it from optical. /shudder.

Regards,
SB

 

[Cyan]

Not allowing to play the game from the BR disc would be the antithesis of Mark Cerny's vision presented at the press conference.
Install while playing, caching ODD to HDD, partial installs, and optional full install are more likely. And if I can play while it install, it's obviously not a mandatory full install.

It will certainly compensate for the lack of space in the long run when you have played or purchased so many games, and it helps to achieve a performance gain in most games, but I wonder if it isn't very stressful for the HD, when you have it spinning for a long time during every gaming session.

 

[patsu]

It doesn't matter.

It only has to install a small bit before you can start playing the game. While playing, the game will be continuing the installation in the background.

In a hand waving fashion (if it doesn’t matter how long it takes to complete mandatory install at all)...

Buahaha... That kinda means the game can be run without mandatory install first, which makes the definition of mandatory install dubious.

It’s just a cache so that the next time you run, it starts right from the HDD instead of BR.

[size=-2]Call it something else.[/size]

 

[Cyan]

In a hand waving fashion (if it doesn’t matter how long it takes to complete mandatory install at all)...

Buahaha... That kinda means the game can be run without mandatory install first, which makes the definition of mandatory install dubious.

It’s just a cache so that the next time you run, it starts right from the HDD instead of BR.

[SIZE=-2]Call it something else.[/SIZE]

I think Halo 2 -how much I loved that game in my day!!- did that iirc.

That meant that starting to play didn't take much time, just a few seconds, except if you played another game that featured some kind of caching to the HDD, then Halo 2 would rewrite the data, and it would take a lot longer to begin playing, but as I said, it was worth it.

 

[patsu]

We should be able to do better now. Like Vita, start the game wherever you left off. On paper, you may not need install at all to do this.

As ERP mentioned, full mandatory install provides a clean, simple and uniform base to work on regardless of the distribution type. The player will get uniform HDD streaming + caching performance. But they need to minimize/hide the install time somehow, which is what Halo 2 (full install) and R&C (partial install) did in their own ways I guess.

For partial installs, they should be mindful not to rely on BR + HDD streaming at the same time so that the game works well as a standalone digital package.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

In a hand waving fashion (if it doesn’t matter how long it takes to complete mandatory install at all)...

Buahaha... That kinda means the game can be run without mandatory install first, which makes the definition of mandatory install dubious.

It’s just a cache so that the next time you run, it starts right from the HDD instead of BR.

[size=-2]Call it something else.[/size]

Sort of, except the game is never played from optical media. All game play and game assets are loaded from the HDD.

Although I guess depending on how you want to think about, when first installing/playing, the game data may be loaded directly from data that is cached in memory before being written to disk. Hence avoiding read/write contention on the HDD. So I guess in a roundabout manner you could think of that as playing from optical. But it isn't really.

Regards,
SB

 

[MrFox]

When an I/O read "miss" the HDD, it will read from the ODD (or cloud), and cache it to the HDD for later accesses. The game is basically played from the ODD until there's no more cache miss. This cannot be called "mandatory full install" or "never played from the ODD".

 

[Pinstripe]

How fast does the install take ?

Faster than the fastest internet connection! Hopefully.

 

[Pinstripe]

Not allowing to play the game from the BR disc would be the antithesis of Mark Cerny's vision presented at the press conference.
Install while playing, caching ODD to HDD, partial installs, and optional full install are more likely. And if I can play while it install, it's obviously not a mandatory full install.

Playing off the optical disk would just create an unnecessary bottleneck for the whole system. No point in putting in DDR5 RAM and Move engines and what have you...and then not allow loading from the HDD.

Besides, no BD drive noise, no kaputt Laserdiodes (cough PS3 cough) due to overuse etc.

 

[MBDF]

Can someone allay my fears that Sony wouldn't go for full installs and create a huge bottleneck.

 

[Arwin]

Just before Mark Cerney shows Knack, you see a slide with four icons, the last of which is a harddrive. All PS4s will come with a harddrive, and my guess would be that 500MB is the smallest size the system would launch with. I am secretly hoping they find a way to put in desktop size HDD rather than 2.5 " laptop size drives, but probably those are too big/hot.

 

[djskribbles]

500MB? Do they make hard drives that small? :smile:

 

[-tkf-]

So there is people that argue that pure digital downloads and purchases is the way to go, which means downloading and installing games sized between 9 to 25+ GB. Which can literally take days depending on the connection and rush on the servers at release.

And there are arguments that the game should start the moment the disc is in the console without installs or anything.

I hope that the developers first and foremost focus on the game, i don't care if it takes hours to install the game if the game is worth it, that being said, i expect them to do whatever they can to make the hassle and time used on installs and downloads to an absolute minimum.

And the intentions from Sony does point in the direction of avoiding the stuff we saw with the PS3. They have a background downloader and patch system, they will track purchases and deliver games to you without you even asking for them. It is reasonable to expect them to carry this over to disc based games, where i am sure that anything from filesystem, package format etc can be and have been improved from the PS3. The speed of the BR drive did imho not match the time it took to copy data to the harddrive. Somewhere there was a bottleneck that slowed everything down.

 

[dagamer]

Question I have is that if Sony is expecting some number of people to own several games and 4K movies in the future, then no 2.5" laptop hard drive is ever going to cut it. At most, you can find 1.5TB drives which are rather expensive, compared to 4TB 3.5" drives that exist today. That might fit 80-160 games or 40-80 movies total or some mixture of the two, but a 1.5TB drive is a little over 1/3 that, which isn't much (27-53 games) and on a 500GB drive, even smaller (8-16 games).