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

Devkit CPU frequency is 1.594Ghz
http://imageshack.us/a/img585/4927/ps4cpu2.jpg

 

But do we know if that's the New Devkit or the devkit that they had up until January with the 8-core Bulldozer at 1.6 Ghz?

 

Also, between when these images were taken and when the console starts mass production Sony could still have potentially increased CPU frequency(though i can't imagine it being much, if they do at all).

 

omgosh, the downgrades just keep coming

 

why would sony increase the frequency ? they have a great balance of performance tuned up with cpu , gpu and ram .! i dont think any dev have complained about the cpu !

 

More processing power won't go amiss. If they can up the clocks without impact the system, go for it. 1.6 GHz was a target on an unknown piece of silicon, but now they have chips to test, they may find they can up the clocks without generating loads more heat.

 

Was the initial VGleaks assertion that the GPU had a 14+4 "split" finally put to pasture?

Looking at the reveal and what Cerny has said, he didn't make mention of any split.

 

The PS3 does a lot of that stuff, especially in Europe and Japan where it can record TV, the problem is that it absolutely sucks at it due to lack of RAM and reserve processing power. It's not that the PS4 will need to do new things, it just needs to do that entire list of things so much better.

In hindsight, the two minutes it takes to switch from playing a game to watching a movie on Netflix is atrocious. Making that experience smoother, faster, and better might not immediately convince people to go out and buy a PS4, but boy, if you ever experience one at a friend's house, I don't think there's ever a way you can go back. It's like having an iPhone 3GS then playing with an iPhone 4 at the store... it's only a matter of time.

 

I still don't understand why 1 GB of RAM is considered huge when phones and tablets ship with 2 GB now.

 

It could be that 4 of the CU's have an extra ALU for computing & the other 14 don't.

 

Because phones and tablets are expected to run concurrent apps and fill up RAM before clearing it out, leaving loads of apps loaded even if barely touched. PS4 won't have need of resident calculator, notepad, maps, store, keyboard, picChat, Sketchbook, camera, blah blah. Users can afford to wait three second to load a small app from HDD. The only major background tasks I can see as worth keeping are communications based (Facebook, Twitter, cross-activity chat) and a browser (for things like game guides in a window while playing), and the online funcitons for things like video uploading. For these tasks, 1 GB should be plenty.

The key choice is balancing experience advantages with more RAM for games versus more RAM for services and experience. If at the end of the day devs can't/won't use more than 6 GBs RAM, than setting 2 GBs aside to store resident apps and stuff makes more sense than having 1 GB of wasted RAM available to games but unused. You can always just preload stuff in there for a more responsive experience.

 

^^^
Well so far devs have shown an insatiable appetite for RAM which makes me think that they want to use/have as much RAM as they can.

 

This reminds me, is there any word if the ps4 brings back the ir port so we can use our universal remotes? I suspect my ir2bt thingie will still work but it would be nice not to need it. For watching media having the device integrated with a good remote is a big plus.

 

I don't know about that. If I was using my pc and I had a 3 second pause every time I alt-tabbed I'd be pretty annoyed with it. On top of that there are a lot of background services that could be run on a console, pretty much what you'd see on a phone or tablet: weather, calendar, mail, IM, dlna server, Skype or Google voice, instagram, pinterest, ebay, photo editing, Internet radio, picture - in - picture video from YouTube etc, and probably a million things I'm not thinking of. If you use many or all of those things frequently, I can't see a 3 second pause being a good experience. And what is the computing world going to look like 3 - 5 years from now when the console is supposed to be peaking. Don't want to leave yourself in a corner, unable to keep up.

 

I think the consensus is that it was badly worded, and there's always a noticeable language translation going on with vgleaks. I assume the "split" was just an expectation that the best "balance" in a normal game would be using 14 CU for graphics and 4 CU for compute.

This is pure conjecture, but maybe they ran simulations and determined that the hardware is reaching a peak performance when 14 CU do shader work, and 4 CU do compute work at the same time.

If 4 CUs are using almost exclusively the Onion/Onion+ bus through the large CPU cache, almost all of the 176GB/s is available to the other 14 CU for Graphics. If they would do it in 2 passes instead, using all 18 CU for compute, and then all 18 CU for Graphics, they'd have bottlenecks. The compute time-slice would be leaving the GDDR5 almost unused, and would saturate the onion bus. The graphics pass would be the opposite, saturating the GDDR5 and leaving the onion bus unused. So there's probably a balance somewhere to use everything at max.... which would be 14/4.

 

You beat me to it. I blame hospital internet.

People are going to want improved experience and integration over this gen and gaming is only half of the usage time, and it's probably going to decrease as services get better. I don't know that the value proposition of 1 more GB of ram for gaming is that high over instant, multitasking services or even game overlays.

 

If I had to guess the 14+4 came from a slide presented at a devcon.
The point of the slide was that given the overall system there is a significant knee in the performance curve and that the PS4 GPU is well past that, and that developers should be looking to use some of the resources for "long running" compute jobs.

 

Another way I'd look at it is that an extra GB of RAM for games wouldn't help them if Apple, Samsung or Valve decided to launch a console 2 years from now (with mostly likely vastly more powerful specs in that timeframe). They certainly don't seem to need the extra GB to compete against the competition. An extra GB could help them put a foothold in the app market at launch and help them keep up with whatever app trends follow. If PS4 is only good at running one app at a time, or not good at multitasking apps and gaming at the same time, then why would app developers bother making apps for it? I can't imagine that's a revenue stream that Sony wants to miss out on. Maybe I'm wrong, and they just don't expect that app world to translate well to consoles, but I think that's incredibly short sighted.

**sorry for mentioning "the competition", but it's part of my reasoning as to why a GB+ of RAM reserve is most likely for PS4**

 

That's a Windows issue. Windows is the most bloated OS in history. (apps also started wasting a stupid amount of disk space and memory when they began using dotNET)

 

What? I said if I was using my pc and there was a 3 second delay to alt-tab, I'd be annoyed with it, not because it actually happened (it doesn't), but because Shifty said loading apps from disc with a 3 second delay would be acceptable on a console.