The Game Developers Conference were proud to welcome the Sony Senior Staff Engineer Chris Norden as he went into deeper technical detail on the hardware that the PS4 currently possesses along with it’s accomplice the PS4 Eye. He will be going into detail on what makes parts of the system tick and how everything works in tandem, however it is important to note that the specifications may change so nothing is set in stone.
AMD x86 CPU and GPU
Norden stressed about the low power consumption and heat being a prominent feature in the new system, which is why they went with a chip which is so environmentally friendly to you and your wallet. He didn’t explicitly say that but it was kind of obvious why Sony would go for such a weak chip for it’s gaming systems. The eight cores are supposed to be capable of running 8 hardware threads, with each core using a 32KiB L1 I-cache and D-cache and each four-core group sharing 2MIB of L2 Cache. The processor will handle things like atomics, threads, fibers with out-of-order execution coupled with advanced ISA.
Sony has also decided to build it’s CPU on what it is calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set , which will include extra debugging support that will not be available on PC’s. This is supposed to give the developers more control and freedom when accessing the shader pipeline, unlike the PS3 or DirectX itself. A low-level API lets coders communicate directly with the hardware which draws it’s comparisons with drivers and is supposed to be much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL.
The system in place will also allow Sony’s console to run graphics and computational code synchronously without stopping one to run the other, Norden explains that Sony worked carefully to balance the two processors to provide maximum graphics power of 1.843 teraFLOPS at an 800Mhz clock speed while still leaving enough headroom for computational tasks. The GPU will also run arbitrary code allowing developers to let loose with parallelized tasks will full access to the systems 8GB of unified memory.
8GB of GDDR5 RAM & Everything Else
Sony has decided to step up on the RAM front and gave the developers 8GB of GDDR5 RAM when everyone settled for 4. Sony has also opted for the exotic kind of RAM found only on GPU’s such as the GTX 680, the main reason for this is because GDDR5 is much faster then it’s counterpart DDR3 used in most systems. Norden also mentioned that the Unified Address Space should cause fewer headaches for developers than the mixed architecture of the PS3. The Blu-Ray drive will be making a comeback and be up to three times faster than the PS3 drive and will include the very large hard drive in every system.
The development environment is based on Windows 7 and is fully integrated with Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 which will allow developers to debug PS4 code just like PC code. The tools will also include C and C++ front ends and numerous more bells and whistles all expected to present luxury to the programmers who will face the task of developing for the system. Development houses will also be able to distribute tool and version updates through a new integrated tool in Windows Explorer.
(more information will be added soon)