November 13, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Dominic Mallinson from Sony Consumer Entertainment America highlighted the design decisions underlying the latest Sony Playstation. The new console offers better capabilities for the gamers and a new unified architecture for the developers to ease development.
The PS 4 is designed to be simpler and easier to use while offering immediate interaction with integrated social media apps. The new architecture replaces the emotion engine with an APU to reduce disruption and patch download and install times. System changes include true names as an option and integration with second screen platforms like the PS Vita.
The overall console performance and viability are still on the leading edge, and new games like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Call of Duty show that gamers are willing to spend a lot of money for AAA games. both of these franchises topped $1B in their first week of sales. Although the console industry is challenged by mobile games, the industry is still promising.
The latest PS 4 has a completely new internal architecture that looks a lot like a supercharged PC. The main processor is an 8-core Jaguar CPU with 4 MB of L2 cache, Radeon GPU with 18 compute units capable of 1.8 TFLOPs. The whole system holds 8 GB of GDDR5 memory that has a 176 GB/s available bandwidth, 500 GB HDD, BlueRay disk player, and custom audio and video chips.
The GPU uses the GCN architecture and is designed to accommodate the anticipated increase in compute in games for the next decade. The unified memory takes advantage of the memory bus bandwidth and reduces communications overhead between processor types within the APU. The long lifecycle anticipates and incorporates the ability for software upgrades, which enables games to get better over that time frame.
The controller is now wireless and includes a speaker and headphone jack so the player is now completely untethered. Integrated links to Facebook, Twitter and other social media complement the connections to UStream and Twitch TV for remote play and live broadcast of ongoing game play. The new Playstation offers the gamer choices in gameplay with both on-line and local disk options.
Sony is supporting a larger developer program to facilitate new apps for the console. The new platform redefines rich and immersive gameplay through performance, flexibility, and personalization.