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

[Love_In_Rio]

Surely the ps3 can be moved into your kids room for safe keeping.

That's where mines going even though he will only be a month or two old when the ps4 comes out lol

Buy a Xacti 5.1 headset along your PS4. A must having babies...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You only have to look at the heat out put of PC graphics cards.. A 7970 doesn't put out twice the heat of a7850.

Not linear, but it does put out 100 watts more going by Wikipedia. 130 W versus 230 W.

Voltage, process, leakage, AISC quality & transistor density all have an affect on the final out put

Sure, but all things being equal, GDDR5 and 50% more GPU should be hotter. Unless the SRAM really does cook, which has been a subject of discussion in the XB1 rumours threads regards yields and I wasn't seeing a conclusion that SRAM is troublesome, I'd expect PS4 to be hotter. Could be wrong though.

 

[datadigi]

How will devs account for PS4 games having much slower transfer speeds/access times than Xbox One games due to being able to play games off the disc on PS4?

 

[DJ12]

I'm sure every game will install what it needs to and be able to read from disc and hdd at the same time so could and should load things faster.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can you play off disk? HDDs are standard. I assume the game caches to HDD and plays off it exactly the same as whether from optical or download. That's the easiest solution for devs, treating the optical drive as an internet connection downloading the game. Alternatively, the optical will allow higher transfer speeds than just HDD if used concurrently.

There's certainly no way devs will be confronted with trying to games streaming direct from the dog-slow BRD drive!

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Sony put out the specs. Nothing change so no down clock or anything!!!

 

[Grall]

How will devs account for PS4 games having much slower transfer speeds/access times than Xbox One games due to being able to play games off the disc on PS4?

Games will be automatically mirrored to HDD from BR disc as it loads, so it won't be slower than xbone. Seriously, they announced this back in february for chrissakes.

 

[DJ12]

Where are the specs and also have they said what size hdd is used 2.5 or 3.5?

 

[fearsomepirate]

Not linear, but it does put out 100 watts more going by Wikipedia. 130 W versus 230 W.

Sure, but all things being equal, GDDR5 and 50% more GPU should be hotter. Unless the SRAM really does cook, which has been a subject of discussion in the XB1 rumours threads regards yields and I wasn't seeing a conclusion that SRAM is troublesome, I'd expect PS4 to be hotter. Could be wrong though.

Supposedly, the GPUs have about the same number of transistors. The XB1's just has more space taken up by "move engines" (in quotes b/c I don't know what those are). Those will generate heat, I assume.

 

[Gipsel]

Supposedly, the GPUs have about the same number of transistors. The XB1's just has more space taken up by "move engines" (in quotes b/c I don't know what those are). Those will generate heat, I assume.

The move engines are very probably very tiny fixed function units with a power consumption hardly worth mentioning in the grand scheme of things.

And regarding the SRAM, as most transistors don't switch in an SRAM array (that scales basically with the bandwidth and compare that to the register files of the CUs ), it's mostly leakage one has to worry about. The dynamic power of CUs is certainly way higher. But there is a reason for the tendency to use 8T-SRAM instead of 6T-SRAM, it is simply easier to operate at lower voltages (with smaller structures, 6T-SRAM doesn't work as reliable as it used to be) which actually reduces leakage/static power consumption even while it consists of 33% more transistors. Maybe that's the problem MS runs into, the SRAM is only reliably operating at quite high voltages and it share it's powerplane with the GPU or something.

Edit:
Why is this discussed here? It would be more appropriate in the XBOne or the comparison thread, isn't it?

 

[Gradthrawn]

Can you play off disk? HDDs are standard. I assume the game caches to HDD and plays off it exactly the same as whether from optical or download. That's the easiest solution for devs, treating the optical drive as an internet connection downloading the game. Alternatively, the optical will allow higher transfer speeds than just HDD if used concurrently.

There's certainly no way devs will be confronted with trying to games streaming direct from the dog-slow BRD drive!

This was covered in the PlayGo description provided by Cerny in the Gamasutra interview.

However, PlayGo "is two separate linked systems," Cerny said. The other is to do with the Blu-ray drive -- to help with the fact that it is, essentially, a bit slow for next-gen games.

"So, what we do as the game accesses the Blu-ray disc, is we take any data that was accessed and we put it on the hard drive. And if then if there is idle time, we go ahead and copy the remaining data to the hard drive. And what that means is after an hour or two, the game is on the hard drive, and you have access, you have dramatically quicker loading... And you have the ability to do some truly high-speed streaming."

To further help the Blu-ray along, the system also has a unit to support zlib decompression -- so developers can confidently compress all of their game data and know the system will decode it on the fly. "As a minimum, our vision is that our games are zlib compressed on media," said Cerny.

So, you're playing off the disc while it's being cached to the drive, with the rest of the data copied in the background during idle times.

Sony put out the specs. Nothing change so no down clock or anything!!!

PS4 downclock is pretty much triple confirmed at this point. You can take that to the bank.

 

[blakjedi]

That would explain the chug of several games during the conference.

 

[Boxercide]

PS4 downclock is pretty much triple confirmed at this point. You can take that to the bank.

What? You quoted yourself in 'confirming' a downclock at odds to the spec sheet released?

 

[Betanumerical]

That would explain the chug of several games during the conference.

I hope your not being serious.

So now Sony is lying on the spec sheet because some games with beta/alpha code chugged/stuttered?.

 

[HollovVpo1nt]

PS4 downclock is pretty much triple confirmed at this point. You can take that to the bank.

Are you trying to be funny? I geniounly can't tell. The Korean and Chinese sources part seem like a stab at rumour origins.

 

[Arwin]

Where are the specs and also have they said what size hdd is used 2.5 or 3.5?

Considering how tiny the PS4 is and that it has an internal PSU I'm guessing 2.5" again.

 

[ERP]

That would explain the chug of several games during the conference.

All the stuff at the conference was playing of HDD.
I'd put the chugs down to incomplete software, either the games or the system.

 

[Deleted member 7537]

I hope your not being serious.

So now Sony is lying on the spec sheet because some games with beta/alpha code chugged/stuttered?.

I think he is joking.

 

[SedentaryJourney]

In case he isn't Sony released a final spec sheet confirming the 800 MHz clock.

Here it is via Eurogamer

 

[Gradthrawn]

The fact that some of you can't tell if I'm serious or not would seem to reflect a very poor state of affairs for the quality of discussion as of late.