They may want to reveal as little as possible to thwart emulation. One of the reasons Xbox original emulation never took of was it was so poorly documented any attempts were difficult despite it having pc components/architecture and used a derivative of directx, while the ps2 documentation was sufficient despite having exotic architecture and many chips that were quite removed from the pcs they were being emulated on.
PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)
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They may want to reveal as little as possible to thwart emulation. One of the reasons Xbox original emulation never took of was it was so poorly documented any attempts were difficult despite it having pc components/architecture and used a derivative of directx, while the ps2 documentation was sufficient despite having exotic architecture and many chips that were quite removed from the pcs they were being emulated on.
Regarding this "mystery chip", are we talking about this 1327KM44S in TQFP-100 package?
I suppose it is just something for board power management or some logic for testing. Wires from that chip goes to IC's which control DC/DC switching regulators (power supply) for APU, secondary chip, etc. Also some LED's on the bottom of the board are connected to this chip.
I suppose it is just something for board power management or some logic for testing. Wires from that chip goes to IC's which control DC/DC switching regulators (power supply) for APU, secondary chip, etc. Also some LED's on the bottom of the board are connected to this chip.
Omg programmable logic. Much fixed function. Secret sauce lighting
yep, it's high power secret lighting engine to render that pulsating blue light of death on the PS4's case
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Jokes aside, if anyone interested in how LED's are oriented see pic bellow, top of the picture is front of the PS4, first LED from the top is oriented down, others to side where HDD is and last is tilted 45°.
It makes sense because light pipe in case is not directly above LED's but much closer to HDD.
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What accelerators is PS4 going to have that XB1 isn't? What accelerators even make sense for a mathematically constructed texture and shader? It's pure maths. Unless PS4 has a procedural noise-generator block (maybe generic DSP), it's not going to use anything other than programmable computation, for which XB1 is theoretically identical.
ACP which I'm guessing stands for Acceleration Processor.
It's part of the whole HSA design.
MS should let sleeping dogs lie, and worry about improving software, not PR. But that's me...
Perhaps you can answer onQ's hypothesis directly? Are the video and audio en/decoding blocks and other units already mentioned in the leaked specs present on the SoC or in the fourth, unknown ASIC (1327KM44S) on the board?
onQ is believing there's silicon in the fourth ASIC that performs notable workloads. The rest of us doubt that but it's hard to prove, hence ongoing speculation of accelerators etc.
It's not hard to prove at all, I'm very surprised I'm first who came up with Power/LED management.
You just need hi-res photos of the motherboard from some teardown site to prove, that ASIC is in control of various DC-DC regulators, also ON/OFF state of whole system and LED's which are doing light effects on PS4.
As hardware guy I can tell you that every modern DC-DC regulator have "enable" pin so you can switch them on/off by delivering 0/1 logic to this pin. There is around 10 or more regulators for different purposes on the PS4 motherboard, Sony needs something to manage different power states and requirements for gradual supply enabling after system is switched ON (and of course LED control).
The IC is a standard PQFP or variant thereof, with internal wire-bonding to the chip (IE, no particularly high data rate signalling etc), no notable power delivery circuitry nearby or any cooling measures of any kind (not even a passive heatsink) etc. The chance this chip performs very much in the way of computation is really low. There could be a simple microcontroller in there sitting on LPC or I2C bus handling power states, programming the PWM LED driver and such of course, but you'd need to de-cap the chip and put it under a microscope to actually prove that. Even so, that's just minor system housekeeping duties that doesn't actually contribute to the aggregate compute power of the console itself, it's minutiae that doesn't really concern anyone except the guys who will do a hardware pass for cost reduction purposes when time comes to do a revision of the hardware.
Anything beyond that is just pointless speculation. "It could be this, or it could be that", well it COULD. It could be a lot of things, but just guessing, blindly - what's the point? Is that what this board is for, making baseless guesses?
It's not additional hardware we know that there is the secondary chip & the media accelerators we just don't know everything that they are doing.
My theory is that the media accelerators/ ACP is the DPU from Tensilica which is programmable & might help the CPU/GPU out a lot by taking the load off of them.
The ACP could be on the APU,secondary chip or the mystery chip I don't know but we know it's there & we know that a lot of the PS4 OS functions are handled in hardware, Remote Play , gameplay recording \live streaming , voice recognition \ voice chat & other stuff.
I think the bulk of what's there has been disclosed.
I will say that at least at release the CPU and GPU "reservation" for the OS on PS4 was close to the rumored XBOne reservation. Though the GPU reservation is soft rather than hard.
Voice recognition is or at least was all software running on the main CPU. There is video encoding hardware, there is a compression engine, there is encryption hardware, there is an Arm processor that is intended to be used for low power operation, there is audio hardware, but it's not as extensive as the descriptions of the XBOne audio block.
The intent was that none that hardware is directly available to the app. Though I think exceptions were made for the decompression hardware.
I might have missed something, but there really isn't anything very exciting.
In terms of physical packaging I have no idea, I've only ever looked at block diagrams.
I will say that at least at release the CPU and GPU "reservation" for the OS on PS4 was close to the rumored XBOne reservation. Though the GPU reservation is soft rather than hard.
Voice recognition is or at least was all software running on the main CPU. There is video encoding hardware, there is a compression engine, there is encryption hardware, there is an Arm processor that is intended to be used for low power operation, there is audio hardware, but it's not as extensive as the descriptions of the XBOne audio block.
The intent was that none that hardware is directly available to the app. Though I think exceptions were made for the decompression hardware.
I might have missed something, but there really isn't anything very exciting.
In terms of physical packaging I have no idea, I've only ever looked at block diagrams.
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