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

Does this sound like Unified Address Space?



From the guy on Arstechnica a day after the PlayStation Meeting before VGLeaks posted the info about the GPU – compute, queues and pipelines

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=23922967#p23922967

 

Yap, I think so. Those data structures should be in some sort of shared memory between the CPU and GPU.

For compute work, it has more 7 more ring buffers per queue likely to improve utilization. One or more of these buffers should (always) have data for the GPU to work on.

The GPU should be able to fetch data via DMA, or access memory directly too.

 

How will Sony implement security this time round?

 

Hire some white hats to pummel the system with every trick they can think of, I can hope.

 

They hired Philip Reitinger in 2011, he's now Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Sony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Reitinger

I would think this guy can secure a system and a network.

 

I guess, but one would assume that So y had some guy in charge of security before. What I really meant by "hire a few white hats" is I guess the Google Chrome approach of paying people who find bugs and exploits. A $50,000 reward is cheap money to Sony but to some hacker who might be tempted by the "dark side" that's still a lot of coin.

 

They also talked to Geohot (out of court that is) a little while back. I think after they settled? There was an article about that. He probably gave them some tips

Preventing memory bus glitching would go a long way I think.. however they could go about doing that. I imagine when everything goes on interposer it becomes harder to do.

 

Probably...

Custom ARM processor to supervise I/O, including background download/upload.

Unspecified amount of Flash RAM accessible only to the OS (for firmware, and working storage).

Constant online checks via PSN.

H/w security features to guard against h/w level attacks.

EDIT:
If DS4 has biometric sensors, then it will/can be used to authorize payment too.

 

And maybe they can use the RFID reader to scan your Credit Card

 

the wifi /bluetooth to implant thoughts of needing more sony products into your brain?

 

According to the net, Gaikai implemented an iPad client before. Probably depends on the video quality to a certain extent.

 

Hm ? It should only encode for Remote Play on Vita.

If it's a client, it should decode the video images in the VCE. If an iPad can run Gaikai client, the PS4 should be able to do so easily.

We should also be able to see the SPUs in action for the PS3 client.

 

Going by HD camcorders, h.264 realtime encode isn't demanding or expensive in custom silicon. If AMDs solution isn't that capable, they should stick in some licensed silicon that is.

 

None of the PS4 streaming features require faster than real-time encoding. That's the whole point of the DVR and spectating: the footage is encoded as it happens. Benchmark comparisons are pretty meaningless, as are any GPGPU enhancements to speed up the process. The VCE just needs to be fast enough not to drop a significant number of frames while encoding directly from the framebuffer, including any potential resizing, or multiplexing to composite in audio commentary or your PS4 Eye video feed. From there it's either dumping a temporary MP4 to the hard drive or streaming live to Ustream and/or your PSN friends over your upstream internet connection.

Clients for RemotePlay or Gaikai features only need to be able to able to decode a relatively low bitrate h.264 video stream (say 8Mbps, well below a good quality Blu-ray encode). Today that includes basically every device in existence.

 

The "VCE/full mode" is a low power system for real-time H264 encoding. The fact that the VCE takes 3:17 to transcode a 1+ hour video is 'not a bad thing'...

In theory the VCE seems a good match for "PS4 share", but it's possible that Sony are using something else.