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

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no geomerics didn't say that. typical wishful thinking.

somebody asked geomerics a question that presumed 7gb and they just went into an answer that didnt address it. so some people look at things like that as some kind of confirmation.

http://gamingbolt.com/xbox-one-ddr3...am-both-are-sufficient-for-realistic-lighting

I would say there is a lot of smoke around the 7GB number.

Given the high speed of gddr5 you can access 5.87 GB per frame @ 30 fps. Really dev could use all 8GB if sony would let them since the bus is so fast.
 
Maybe Sony did add those 4GB just for games as requested and the OS footprint never went above the original 512MB.
 
Maybe Sony did add those 4GB just for games as requested and the OS footprint never went above the original 512MB.

If that's the case, Sony is being pretty short sighted. It pigeon holes what they want their console to be for the lifetime of the device.
 
IMO the logical thing for being future proof and give OS enough space for future new functionalities would be 2GB for OS and 6GB for games.
 
If that's the case, Sony is being pretty short sighted. It pigeon holes what they want their console to be for the lifetime of the device.

I'd say the opposite. Sony's entire focus has been games above all else, and Xbox One has been about an entire entertainment experience. The design of each console reflects this. There is nothing short sighted about either strategy.

The PS4 could easily offer the same app functionality as the Xbox One, and still give most of the RAM to devs. Only you'll have to wait just a few more seconds to load Netflix, or go to menu. That's part of the value MS is counting on, and the main difference in design between the consoles.

I don't think either company is being 'short sighted', they just have different priorities that will play out in the marketplace.


edit: am in tech thread... sry ;)
 
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IMO the logical thing for being future proof and give OS enough space for future new functionalities would be 2GB for OS and 6GB for games.

Based on what? This only matters while you are playing a game. Once out of the game you have access to the full resources of the system. The os/apps are not gated to 2/1GB of ram. Since the game does not stay running.

Seem just stupid to gate off even 1GB of ram. Why do they need that much ram to run the OS in the background? There is very few thing i want loaded while I'm gaming. The system was design around 512MB of ram. What feature is so great that it needs 4x that?

With everyone having smart phones and tablet. I never want to use my TV has a second screen. Having apps sideloaded is a waste of resources. Is saving 10 secs of load worth losing 15% of your ram? Not for me...
 
doesnt the reserved ram also needed for "suspending" game?
PS4 have the ability to suspend game wherever and whenever. If it does it like iOS and Windows Phone, then Sony does not need to reserve lots of RAM but will need fast hard disk (or they use Hybrid HDD?, extra flash memory?)

if they suspend like Android, then they will need lots of RAM reserved for this suspend feature.

>> ps4 suspend http://www.psu.com/a018423/
there's no loading, just resume play.
 
doesnt the reserved ram also needed for "suspending" game?
PS4 have the ability to suspend game wherever and whenever. If it does it like iOS and Windows Phone, then Sony does not need to reserve lots of RAM but will need fast hard disk (or they use Hybrid HDD?, extra flash memory?)

if they suspend like Android, then they will need lots of RAM reserved for this suspend feature.

>> ps4 suspend http://www.psu.com/a018423/
there's no loading, just resume play.

No. You don't need extra memory to preserve content that's already in memory. The suspend mode mentioned at the reveal and in the article is specifically in regards to putting the console to sleep. The game state just stays in memory (the memory it was already using). Needs enough power to keep the memory state active, and the custom chip can handle the rest as it normally would until the console is brought out of standby (the APU should by and large be un-powered, since memory sits outside of the APU). They are not suspending an app to memory so that you can launch another app. Even then it would make more sense to suspend memory to a virtual memory/page file specific to the tile on the HDD, as the XBO is doing.
 
*ahem* do not bring the other console into this thread and do not turn this into a comparison or versus thread.
 
IMO the logical thing for being future proof and give OS enough space for future new functionalities would be 2GB for OS and 6GB for games.

I feel like if something is important enough that it would take up 2GB of ram maybe you shouldn't be still playing the game & you should be focused on whatever it is that's so important that it needs to use up to 2GB of ram.
 
Hmnm, Cerny says PS4 is small cause "power consumption is less".

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/83714/Mark+Cerny:+"they+know+how+to+design+PS4+so+it+won't+overheat"/

"I think it will be fine," he replied. "They know how to design the console so it doesn't overheat. If you notice that PlayStation 4 is smaller, it's because power consumption is less; simple as that."

Question is, less than what? XB1? Current PS3? Launch PS3?

7850 TDP is 130 watts...I'm not seeing a whole lot of wiggle room with 8GB GDDR5 too.

Will be pretty interesting to me if these consoles come in significantly <last gen at launch.
 
Hmnm, Cerny says PS4 is small cause "power consumption is less".

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/83714/Mark+Cerny:+"they+know+how+to+design+PS4+so+it+won't+overheat"/



Question is, less than what? XB1? Current PS3? Launch PS3?

7850 TDP is 130 watts...I'm not seeing a whole lot of wiggle room with 8GB GDDR5 too.

Will be pretty interesting to me if these consoles come in significantly <last gen at launch.
I have never understood why people think gddr5 uses some massive amount of power.

Biggest difference between ps4 vs ps3 slim is you have a single chip system vs dual. Being able to use a single heatsink is most likely the biggest reason the case is smaller.
 
I have never understood why people think gddr5 uses some massive amount of power.

Biggest difference between ps4 vs ps3 slim is you have a single chip system vs dual. Being able to use a single heatsink is most likely the biggest reason the case is smaller.
Well because it does, be it memory chips or the memory controller, go head and compare discrete GPU cards available with ddr3 and gddr5. Thought we don't speak about a crazy different, usually those cards are low end so the tdp is not highto begin with.
 
Hmnm, Cerny says PS4 is small cause "power consumption is less".

http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/83714/Mark+Cerny%3A+%22they+know+how+to+design+PS4+so+it+won%27t+overheat%22/



Question is, less than what? XB1? Current PS3? Launch PS3?

7850 TDP is 130 watts...I'm not seeing a whole lot of wiggle room with 8GB GDDR5 too.

Will be pretty interesting to me if these consoles come in significantly <last gen at launch.
That sounds a lot like PR bs. It seems that Sony decided to unilaterally orient its communication on hardware and hammering (though in clever manner) every choices MSFT made.
I would indeed be surprised if the PS4 consumes less than a radeon 7850, the clock is barely lower, there are 8 CPU cores in there, a lot more memory chips, the HDD, the optical drive.
Though the chip should be bigger (it has too) than Pitcairn, I think that the "Watts per mm^2" you have to dissipate should be lower than in the HD7850 making cooling easier ( the same applies to durango possibly to a greater extend). The result is the cooling system should run more efficiently.
I think Cerny speaks about the power consumption of the original PS3, that makes more sense, the elusiveness of his statement is a clever PR twist.

There are others, like the ease of development, no lies here the ps4 is the most straight forward system to ever land in the console realm, though there is something underlying in his talk that is not exactly fair: they make it sounds like MSFT are bad, that the 360 was a hell to code for, etc.
Imo that is the reason about his talk about the "others PS4", I absolutely believe that they considered the option but as the guy is clever he leverages that to make competition looks bad. In the process he forgets to speak about the API and related tools and the overhead as far as "easiness of coding" of having low level access to the hardware.

Anyway I guess it is fair from a business POV, actually I think he does it really well, in a subtle enough manner, I think he is as clever as he looks ;)
 
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Big honking Mark Cerny interview, or "B3D aks Cerny questions" :p

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-face-to-face-with-mark-cerny

Some interesting stuff I picked out as I go

Digital Foundry: Is there dedicated audio processing hardware within the PlayStation 4? What can it do?

Mark Cerny: There's dedicated audio hardware. The principal thing that it does is that it compresses and decompresses audio streams, various formats. So some of that is for the games - you'll have many, many audio streams in MP3 or another format and the hardware will take care of that for you. Or, on the system side for example, audio chat - the compression and decompression of that.

Digital Foundry: Going back to GPU compute for a moment, I wouldn't call it a rumour - it was more than that. There was a recommendation - a suggestion? - for 14 cores [GPU compute units] allocated to visuals and four to GPU compute...

Mark Cerny: That is bad leaks and not any sort form of formal evangelisation. The point is the hardware is intentionally not 100 per cent round. It has a little bit more ALU in it than if you were thinking strictly about graphics. As a result of that you have an opportunity, almost like an incentivisation, to use that ALU for GPGPU.

Digital Foundry: If we can go on to GDDR5 and the PlayStation Meeting in New York... 8GB, it surprised everyone. Was it really that late in the day that the decision was made to bump up the memory? You said earlier that you weren't in the meeting where the developers were demanding it, how crucial was it?

Mark Cerny: That was really a case where our developer-driven process worked. So we received feedback, we listened to the feedback, we altered the hardware as a result. As far as how late it was in the process, actually what you're seeing there is just the developers were very, very good about keeping information confidential. As near as I can tell that all came from one rogue hacker, who wasn't even disclosed by us, how managed to hack into a developer and extract both the Microsoft and Sony documentation.

Digital Foundry: Developers tell us that they love the GDDR5, they love the bandwidth but there are questions on latency. How do you cope with that in your set-up? It's not something that developers have much experience with in terms of interfacing with a CPU.

Mark Cerny: Latency in GDDR5 isn't particularly higher than the latency in DDR3. On the GPU side... Of course, GPUs are designed to be extraordinarily latency tolerant so I can't imagine that being much of a factor.

Nothing earth shattering I guess.
 
The most interesting non-answer for me:

Mark Cerny said:
Digital Foundry: I guess from there we move to AMD as the partner of choice for creating PlayStation 4. Was it the research and products along the lines of the APUs that most excited you?

Mark Cerny: You know, this probably doesn't quite answer your question, but there are so many issues involved in working with a vendor. The business relationship is also very important. The timelines are very important, because you might be working with the brightest people in the business but if their product doesn't come out in the specific year that you need it, you can't work with them. There were a tremendous number of considerations and the choice of AMD came out of that.

Cerny is stating facts of course, who you want to work with, or your preference for technology, can be ruled out for other reasons like cost or timing, but he he says "the choice of AMD came out of that."

Not the decision mind, the choice. As though they only had one choice: AMD. It could just be lazy language though, I'm Cerny was doing a lot of talking that day.
 
Maybe he was talking of ARM that the Forbes article said was a year too late (on having enough CPU power)

Only thing that really pops to mind.
 
Maybe he was talking of ARM that the Forbes article said was a year too late (on having enough CPU power)

Only thing that really pops to mind.
If Cerny did mean AMD was the only choice, that means nothing else was viable. Intel. Nvidia. PowerVR. ARM. MIPS. PowerPC, or any combinations thereof. At least not based on their budget, timeline and goals.

Like I said, he may just have used a poor choice of words.
 
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