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

[Silent_Buddha]

I paid $80 for a top rated Samsung 128gb ssd last year. 256gb models routinely sell for about $140. Obviously it doesn't compare to a mechanical hdd, but the point is if Sony's OS to needs a patch of high quality flash it won't break the bank. Sub $10 for 16gb is realistic.

Sure you can get the SSDs on sale, but you can also get HDDs on sale. I based those prices off of the standard everyday pricing you can find for the respective lines. The pricing in that case shifts down for both. I could have just as well used the 270 USD price for a 500 GB Samsung 840. Which makes it quite nice at about 0.54 USD per GB beating out the ~0.625 USD for your 128 GB example. I bought one of them. And since I've been tracking it. It's only dipped down that low once in the entire time the drive has been available. Typically it's far more expensive than that. And sales on it generally don't dip below 350 USD and we're back to that 0.70 USD price from before with the 240-256 GB sweet spot in pricing.

So, if we're using once in a blue moon type pricing or clearance pricing, then you can also occasionally get 3 TB HDDs for about 100 USD, dropping the price per GB down to about 0.033 USD per GB. Although I've seen clearance prices on a 3TB line once for ~90 USD making that an even 0.03 USD per GB.

Likewise for 2.5" drives I've occasionally seen 1 TB drives dip down to ~50 USD on clearance. Which brings those down to ~0.05 USD per GB. Still an order of magnitude cheaper than SSD.

Regards,
SB

 

[MrFox]

Maybe the 16GB flash existed earlier in the project planning... and they ditched it to pay for the 8GB GDDR5.
(actually I'm only half-joking, it's a real possibility).

But I'm still hoping for one or two GB of LPDDR directly on the south bridge, much more interesting than a flash boot partition and less expensive. There's nothing better than ram for buffers and caches and that would help the OS responsiveness everywhere except during cold boot (and it's supposed to be always on, anyway, right?). If that small CPU needs ram anyway, might as well put a bigger ram chip and ditch the flash.

 

[Xenus]

Yeah RAM on the southbright could theoretically allow almost none of the 8GB's of GGDR5 being required for system use

 

[Exophase]

Maybe the 16GB flash existed earlier in the project planning... and they ditched it to pay for the 8GB GDDR5.
(actually I'm only half-joking, it's a real possibility).

But I'm still hoping for one or two GB of LPDDR directly on the south bridge, much more interesting than a flash boot partition and less expensive. There's nothing better than ram for buffers and caches and that would help the OS responsiveness everywhere except during cold boot (and it's supposed to be always on, anyway, right?). If that small CPU needs ram anyway, might as well put a bigger ram chip and ditch the flash.

How much does even 1GB of LPDDR2 cost? I'm thinking at least $10 or so, enough to make a big difference in total BOM cost for a device that's really cost sensitive. If you're talking PoP it could make the package a lot larger than it needs to be and add to assembly costs as well. Probably better off just having DDR3 instead if they must have something, the power savings aren't worth the added costs..

Of course it's then only as good as its connection to the APU is, no idea what that'll be using (Hyper Transport?), of course it makes sense for Sony to try to keep the pin count on this interface down. Doesn't necessarily mean it'll be slow, per se.

I don't think the OS, if done well anyway, will really need 1GB of performance critical data that it's capable of loading very quickly. Real value could be a lot smaller. For the game's disk caching they may opt to sacrifice some of main RAM for it; no reason why this has to happen transparently on the south bridge chip.

 

[MrFox]

How much does even 1GB of LPDDR2 cost? I'm thinking at least $10 or so, enough to make a big difference in total BOM cost for a device that's really cost sensitive. If you're talking PoP it could make the package a lot larger than it needs to be and add to assembly costs as well. Probably better off just having DDR3 instead if they must have something, the power savings aren't worth the added costs..

Of course it's then only as good as its connection to the APU is, no idea what that'll be using (Hyper Transport?), of course it makes sense for Sony to try to keep the pin count on this interface down. Doesn't necessarily mean it'll be slow, per se.

I don't think the OS, if done well anyway, will really need 1GB of performance critical data that it's capable of loading very quickly. Real value could be a lot smaller. For the game's disk caching they may opt to sacrifice some of main RAM for it; no reason why this has to happen transparently on the south bridge chip.

$10 per GB sounds about right. It's expensive compared to DDR3 but it could be the only way to reach EU requirements of 0.5W standby power. It's an insanely low amount of power and I don't know what the exact rules are. I mean when it's downloading, do they consider that standby?

The iSuppli tear down of the galaxy S4 is interesting, 2GB LPDDR3 and 16GB eMMC is estimated at 28$ for the sum of both.
This is almost sure to be the class1500 chip too, there's no device from samsung that's more high-end than the S4. So if 2GB LPDDR3 is about $20, the fast 16GB eMMC doing 140MB/s could be under $10. (or vice-versa, either way it's a good choice, whatever's the least expensive)
http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/Ne...als-IHS-iSuppli-Virtual-Teardown-Reveals.aspx

 

[Brad Grenz]

Sure you can get the SSDs on sale, but you can also get HDDs on sale. I based those prices off of the standard everyday pricing you can find for the respective lines. The pricing in that case shifts down for both. I could have just as well used the 270 USD price for a 500 GB Samsung 840. Which makes it quite nice at about 0.54 USD per GB beating out the ~0.625 USD for your 128 GB example. I bought one of them. And since I've been tracking it. It's only dipped down that low once in the entire time the drive has been available. Typically it's far more expensive than that. And sales on it generally don't dip below 350 USD and we're back to that 0.70 USD price from before with the 240-256 GB sweet spot in pricing.

So, if we're using once in a blue moon type pricing or clearance pricing, then you can also occasionally get 3 TB HDDs for about 100 USD, dropping the price per GB down to about 0.033 USD per GB. Although I've seen clearance prices on a 3TB line once for ~90 USD making that an even 0.03 USD per GB.

Likewise for 2.5" drives I've occasionally seen 1 TB drives dip down to ~50 USD on clearance. Which brings those down to ~0.05 USD per GB. Still an order of magnitude cheaper than SSD.

Regards,
SB

I haven't been tracking prices this year. When I was buying $80-90 for a Samsung 830 or Crucial M4 was a really common price.

But why do you keep bringing up mechanical hard drive prices? It doesn't matter how cheap they are per GB if they are unsuitable for the features planned. We know the PS4 will ship with a big mechanical hard drive. We're just talking about the possibility of a rumored 16GB of flash that will also be included for OS use.

 

[Safi]

Is a hybrid HD possible, 500GB HD and 16GB flash?

 

[patsu]

I have a hybrid SSD in my PS3. Not much difference in performance, perhaps because the PS3 games are optimized for regular HDD.

The PS4 is rumored to "cache" BR reads to HDD automatically. Unfortunately, we have not heard anything more.

There are however conflicting comments about TrustZone support to date.

 

[Prophecy2k]

Surely a Hybrid drive would be a very bad choice as it would limit drive upgrade options severly.

What happens if they die off in 3 years?

I think integrating solid state memory much closer to the processors would be a much better option, both in terms of performance and flexibility.

 

[Gradthrawn]

Good, but very brief, Mark Cerny interview with Nikkei about some of the hardware design. Not sure if there was any ambiguity left, but it also confirms the 16x 512 MB memory modules. It also has a few other ambiguous tidbits I don't think I've seen before (2nd page).

One of the elements that characterize the hardware configuration of the PS4 is its main memory. A bandwidth of 176 Gbytes per second was realized by using 16 4-Gbit GDDR5 memory chips, Cerney said.

 

[Exophase]

Wow, several terabyte per second bandwidth if using eDRAM. Too bad Durango and Wii U aren't anywhere remotely in that league.

 

[yewyew]

Good, but very brief, Mark Cerny interview with Nikkei about some of the hardware design. Not sure if there was any ambiguity left, but it also confirms the 16x 512 MB memory modules. It also has a few other ambiguous tidbits I don't think I've seen before (2nd page).

16??? They MUST be 3D stacked, IMO...

 

[Exophase]

16??? They MUST be 3D stacked, IMO...

Not like this thing is a phone.. there's enough room for 16 GDDR5 chips on a console PCB. Do we even know how large it is?

 

[BRiT]

Would this likely mean 8 layer PCB to route that?

 

[Brad Grenz]

If I understand the way clamshell mode works, it takes no more traces that 8 chips would, you just have chips paired on both sides of the pcb.

 

[yewyew]

Hey guys, is there anyone that can do a real good translation of this?

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/column/kaigai/20130329_593760.html

 

[patsu]

Heh heh, the author places the CPU clock as > 1.8GHz ?

 

[Gradthrawn]

Heh heh, the author place the CPU clock as > 1.8GHz ?

They have some nice graphs/charts/illustrations in that article (in English). However, the Google translation of the article text says something along the lines of the final clock rate not yet being published due to the question of potential yields. So, perhaps, as of GDC, its still up in the air? For the CPU, that is. GPU seems locked already.

 

[patsu]

Should have pinned it as >= 1.6GHz

 

[Gradthrawn]

Memory discussion, difficulties in cost reducing DDR (while maintaining transfer rate), and plans for cost reduction with GDDR5 (and what they did for the PS3's XDR among others).

However, in the case of the PS4 this time, you can be reduced to half the number of eight DRAM chips. Because of supporting both x32 GDDR5 is and x16, I can reduce the number of DRAM chips to increase the amount of width in the same interface. Seen in the interface of 256-bit of APU, and the current configuration of the product is connected to the 4G-bit GDDR5 16 in x16. It is composed of a total of 16 8GB. This is, I can switch to the configuration of eight in 8G-bit x32 product when out of GDDR5. By the way, XDR DRAM, if we have succeeded PS3, I was able to reduce to two the number of speed XDR2 DRAM chips by switching to the main memory.

Current/Future: