Yoshida confirms SCE working on new hardware

its not actually an engine, its Edge tools which is available to all parties

 

I have two main ideas in regards to a PS4 successor:

1. Keep the current Cell BE in it's same form, use an Nvidia Fermi derivative, 2+ GB of GDDR5. It would satisfy Nvidia's GPGPU desires, yet still retain familiar main processor territory for devs, and I would assume getting backwards compatibility to work wouldn't be too difficult.

2. Go with a Cell Derivative be it a "dual/quad Cell" system or perhaps in my mind (it seems you guys want more general purpose capability) a derivative that either retains the same 8 SPUs but with possibly up to four PPC cores. Again I would have these tied to a Fermi based GPU with 2+ GB GDDR5.

How feasible do you guys think it would be for Sony to pull an Intel and put two full PowerXCell 8is on the same die like the Core 2 Quads?

 

Why would Sony want to go with Nvidia? I seriously doubt they're happy at all with them. Fermi is different enough from the RSX that your PS3 low level 3D code will most likely not work, so you might as well ditch them and go with ATI, which provided the better GPU last time.

I'm all for a souped up Cell (would love to see that actually) but please, get rid of NV for the PS4.

 

To be fair though, from CPU perspective, PS2 main-memory has lower latency then L2 cache does on 360/PS3. So things didn't really improve much in that regard...
In a perverse way it's a good thing CPU clocks hit a wall, letting memory do some catch-up for a change.

 

Nvidia might be more desperate the second time around, and willing to make concessions.
If that was never a factor, the Cell PPU and Xenon as we know them wouldn't exist.

 

From what I remember, the cell is built for 2 or more to work together. Remember those old slides of cells connected in parallel? and according to rumors, Sony also considered using 2 cells for the ps3(one for general and one for the graphics.)

I also remember, according to Goto of impress, Sony was considering removing XDR support and moving over to gddr5 for the main memory interface. I hope this doesn't break backwards compatibility.

 

Why on earth should Sony prioritise satisfying "nVidias GPGPU desires"? Which are HPC targeted and pretty much a complete flop from an actual production use point of view, nevermind its lack of relevance for game code.

 

Wall Street Journal talks about a new 3G-aware portable gaming machine from Sony:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703636404575352681516157268.html

 

I might be going against the grain here...but I say screw the developers!!

Seriously guys when you think about it what would the PS3 have been if developers designed it? More then likely it would have been a rebagged PC ala Xbox1 with all the RAM they could afford to throw into it.

The PS2 and PS3 have been able to do things many people thought it could never do because on paper, the developers, the entire community saw those machines as inferior because they were different-they operated differently. Some of the games that came out of the PS2 many developers back in the day would have said "Impossible, it doesn't have enough ram" or "the graphic synthesizer can't handle that stuff" and yet it did because developers HAD to think differently.

The PS3 is another prime example of how it FORCED developers to look at programing differently and look what has come because of it. GOW, Uncharted 2, KZ2; these games are so impressive because the developers were forced to learn new ways to get power out of the machines and it allowed them to go further then they would have if they designed the machine themselves with the same budget and features.

My fear is that the developers are going to want things easy (we all know its human nature) and because of it the machine is not going to be as good as it could be. Yes developers will get some great results out of it right away but since the learning curve is almost non-existant and the tech is so normal to them they won't bother looking for new ways to accomplish things and the progression will be minimal.


If the developers had thier hand in the design of the PS3 originally, would we have gotten GOW with almost no jaggies? Would UC2 have looked as good as it does or instead would it simply have raised the quality of lesser titles and put more games on an even playing field. UC2 wouldn't look as good but Haze would have been better. GOW wouldn't have the stunning visuals but "insert random movie based game here" would be better.

IMHO developers are more concerned about "Here and Now" while the hardware manufactures have to look at "What we need in the future". It seems Sony has had the philosophy of "What can we do to get the most power for this price" and the Developers philosophy is "What do I want more of now to get more out of my game"

 

Just because it is reported now doesn't mean it's an initiative which has only just been introduced. Far more likely that this is something Kaz Hirai wanted to introduce (in fact probably part of the reason he replaced Kutaragi in the first place) and has been in place for some time. You're right that you'd start talking to developers right at the outset of a project, but there's nothing that suggests that time is now, just because the news comes out now.

 

Sony seriously needs something to compete with ipad and wp7. PSPgo is a failure, and PSP in general is looking like a dead end. The only company that can make a succesful pure gaming device is nintendo, it seems. I think the success of ipad has really got sony worried a bit.

 

It awaits to be seen if they can keep that up in the light of ubiquitous portable platforms and every improving mobile phones. Also iPad has sold phenominally, but will it sell >50 million like PSP, or will it sell to a hardcore gadget-freak iPod crowd yet fail to get widestream penetration?

Personally I think the idea of a portable games machine is a dead end, and whatever Sony comes up with ahs to include mobile phone functions, at least like iPod/iPhone having the option of the same device with and without.

 

Hard to see how Sony has any room to introduce a new mobile device standard against Apple and Android, and a PSP phone that didn't run a broad selection of apps would be severely handicapped in the smartphone market.

What does that leave them? An Android phone with unusual 3d hardware, actual gaming controls and a Sony gaming store?

OK? Maybe?

 

I don't think it will be a phone but a very customized android powered gaming device. I hate to say it, but Sony needs to copy nintendo and make this device 3D to give it that "gotta have it factor"

 

I think you're completely wrong what devs will achieve is more a matter of the budget they are allocated with.
I think anyway that the industry should move from their monolithic business model as well as pricing model.
Lot of games should be in between xbla/psn and "standard" games in regard to price, only "real' AAA titles should launch at 60$ or more. Budgets should adapt so for overall games quality we should listen to devs.

 

And all Sony got was a few first party titles that really shined graphically, while Sony's most relevant competitor used a more developer friendlier and less exotic hardware and software design to create pretty much parity between the two console for third party titles by far the largest slice of either library.

Its not really conducive to depend on third party developers to fill out the breadth of your library and then engineer a console with the motto, "screw the developer". It also wouldn't help Sony as a first party publisher who has to bankroll those highend titles that can take years to squeeze out enough graphic fidelity to be readily discernible as better than whats found on the competitor's console.

 

They did screw the developers, the problem is that because the Wii and Xbox 360 did so well relatively speaking the developers unlike the last generation had the opportunity to say 'screw you right back'.

No console is an island anymore, not even the Wii. Consoles can't be too powerful or that performance is wasted and they can't be too weak or they risk not recieving as much multi-platform software as they ought to. they also can't be too exotic either and any feature not replicated on other consoles is a feature which risks being under-utilised.

As much as we would like to argue about consoles here and their hardware the fact remains that so long as its reasonably cheap, has reasonable performance and is reasonably easy to port to it will be the user experience and not the physical hardware / software layers which determines how well a console will do.

 

I meant it from the point of view of Nvidia being happy about a mainstream product capable of GPGPU stuff. Would it not be important to have Nvidia around for the successor so that Sony gets the best possible support about taking PS3 graphics code and converting to run on a Fermi equiped PS4? I'm sure Sony doesn't want to include the RSX just to make the PS4 backwards compatible, assuming of course, it's a Cell based system. And yes, I see BC to be imperative to the success of the PS4 (all the next systems) unless the current system's are dirt cheap (under $100 US) by the time those next systems release.

 

To be fair, RSX wasn't at all exotic in its hardware or software programming model. If RSX had wound up being a fair competitor to Xenos, I wonder how much grief Cell and the split memory model alone would have given developers.

To the extent that RSX is the problem, it seems more an issue of NVidia being a half-generation behind ATI at the time PS3 came out than that Sony deliberately created a weird system to make it hard for programmers.

 

currently not gonna happen.

"Sony has no plans to use 3D technology in future PSP iterations, according to SCE Worldwide Studios vice president Scott Rohde."

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