Playstation 4

[Johnmcl7]

Indeed, seems they will be using the new Jaguar cores (next gen past Piledriver) So should be really interesting.

It's the other way round, Jaguar is based on the older Bobcat core which is AMD's Atom rival

ImaNihilist - I agree, I can't believe I wasted two hours watching the announcement. I couldn't believe when it was finished as I thought the big finale was going to be showing the actual console but no. I guess they want to avoid the nonsense with the PS3 when they announced it was going to have dual hdmi out, gigabit router and seven controllers but surely it makes sense to announce your console when it's actually ready to be announced as it looks completely daft announcing a console and showing very little of it. I also thought most of the content they showed was disappointing given initially they were claiming it wasn't just about more power, it was about more capabilities and highlighting the physics capabilities yet none of the games looked anything more than more graphically advanced versions of current games.

I was particularly disappointed with the Driveteam demo as I was hoping for something impressive such as being able to have much larger scale races with many more cars as I'm a big fan of endurance racing (50+ cars in FIAWEC in four different classes) and while I liked that Forza 4 tried to implement that it was a bit rubbish with just 12 cars split over the three classes. But no, apparently the selling point is that they've modelled very tiny detail including the weave in the carbon fibre and the thread in the fabric with the big selling point being you could step into the car and fasten your seatbelt from a first person point of view. I know they were on about their challenge system as well but that doesn't seem anything special particularly in light of Forza Horizon which already has such a system.

Not that I'm expecting anything more from Microsoft, just was hoping for more.

John

[Johnmcl7]

Really? wanna bet it will be advertised as 2 in one ? a Console and full PC at the same time ?

This is a GREAT machine ... if done right.

it will be the only PC with DDR5 memory in the market for like 5 years .. plus the 8G of RAM which is enough for most. and the low power tiny size POWERFULL 8 cores machine.

They aren't powerful cores, the Jaguar cores are based on the older Bobcat core which is AMD's Atom rival so a long way off AMD's most powerful processor which itself is quite a bit off Intel's more powerful processors.

John

[Skywize]

With next gen consoles mimicing PCs so closely what exactly is the point of a console?
AMD X86 CPU, AMD graphic chip, DDR memory, windows 8 , internet - add keyboard and mouse and voila - PC.
And then all of a sudden 500$ doesn't sound so expensive anymore.

[Johnmcl7]

With next gen consoles mimicing PCs so closely what exactly is the point of a console?
AMD X86 CPU, AMD graphic chip, DDR memory, windows 8 , internet - add keyboard and mouse and voila - PC.
And then all of a sudden 500$ doesn't sound so expensive anymore.

The main advantage of the console is still the same regardless of whether it's X86 hardware or not, because it is a single platform and every console is identical it allows the developers to optimise their games far beyond what can be feasibly done on a PC. If you look at Valve's hardware results you'll see there are very few high end video cards with the top graphics card being Intel's integrated card followed by mostly midrange graphics cards and a lot of older ones:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

PC developers simply can't optimise for top end hardware because there's so little of it out there that it wouldn't be worth the time, instead they have to try and cover as much of the market as possible.

John

[PCVSNotebook]

They aren't powerful cores, the Jaguar cores are based on the older Bobcat core which is AMD's Atom rival so a long way off AMD's most powerful processor which itself is quite a bit off Intel's more powerful processors.

John

How come ? they have DDR5 controller ... how come they are the same chip ? besides it is not Atom rival , it is the i3/i5 low voltage rival at 18 watts and 4 cores which the i3/i5/i7 ULV cant do so far (only 2 cores) ...

[richardginn]

PS4 Advertisement :

It is not only a Console ! it is a PC ... Install Windows 8 on an external USB3 Drive and you will have a full functioning 8 cores PC !

guys the this machine has HD 7850 performance ...

and I think if AMD wants to defeat Intel , they should release this kind of hardware FAST... I would pick an 8 cores AMD with built in 7850 and 8G DDR5 shared !!! or maybe 16G in case of desktop.

add another HD 7850 for cross fire ..

all this for like 500$ !

Intel is in GREAT DANGER here ! they dont even have DDR4 yet for desktop.

BUTT they are not going to sell this as a PC though. I say both AMD and Intel have some sort of DDR4 motherboard in a test phase. Sony is not going to like it if you dual boot this machine, but this looks like something that can easily be done though.

I say late next year you will see DDR4 for sale if we are lucky.

[flutie98]

Here is a great article on the internals

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/0...-game-console/

[James]

It's the other way round, Jaguar is based on the older Bobcat core which is AMD's Atom rival

Thanks for the correction.

How come ? they have DDR5 controller

Note that it is not DDR5, it's GDDR5. As the above comment states, GDDR5 is based on DDR3 technoology but has higher latency in a tradeoff for higher bandwidth. General purpose computing is much more latency sensitive.

[Johnmcl7]

How come ? they have DDR5 controller ... how come they are the same chip ? besides it is not Atom rival , it is the i3/i5 low voltage rival at 18 watts and 4 cores which the i3/i5/i7 ULV cant do so far (only 2 cores) ...

It is an Atom rival, its performance is roughly between Atom and Athlon II while the Intel CULV i3/i5 are significantly more powerful - you can't compare Intel's cores to AMD's as the Intel cores are more powerful even with a lower core count as their hyperthreading assists them in multithreading. Earlier someone already quoted AT, here's one of their initial articles on Bobcat: (Brazos is a mix of Bobcat cores and Radeon GPU)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/t...-for-miniitx/9

Just as was the case with Atom, Brazos isn't going make for a very powerful primary PC. Load up the thread count or throw heavier workloads at it and the E-350 doesn't look all that much better than an Atom D510. What it will give you however is better single-threaded performance than Atom and a much better feature set. Brazos makes those secondary or tertiary computers you build much better than they would have been otherwise with Atom. I would like to see more CPU performance out of the platform and I'm not too keen on meeting the single core versions, but viewed through ION glasses Brazos looks good.

The PS4 article also mentions Anand's disappointment in the weak processor choice:

While I'm happier with Sony's (and MS') CPU selection this time around, I always hoped someone would take CPU performance in a console a bit more seriously

Whether it needs it or not is a different issue however it certainly is not a powerful processor.

John

[ImaNihilist]

Really? wanna bet it will be advertised as 2 in one ? a Console and full PC at the same time ?

This is a GREAT machine ... if done right.

it will be the only PC with DDR5 memory in the market for like 5 years .. plus the 8G of RAM which is enough for most. and the low power tiny size POWERFULL 8 cores machine.

even Apple MAC Mini is in Danger here . I would replace my desktop pc machine with PS4 if they release it open for windows install.

We'll have faster memory on the PC/device side in like 18 months, maybe less. Maybe not 8GB worth, but I wouldn't be surprised if the next iPad has some DDR5, or the next iteration of Surface has 4GB+ of some-new-fast-memory.

No one is in danger of generic reference hardware made by a vendor who is near bankruptcy. Because reality is, hardware doesn't matter anymore. Any company can call up AMD or Intel and be like, "We want a CPU, GPU and a crap ton of memory, what's it going to cost?" This isn't some fancy POWER architecture with a custom GPU, or some new kind of "cell" professor. It's just a standard X86 rig where Sony eats some of the cost in the hope they can make it back on software sales.

[ImaNihilist]

With next gen consoles mimicing PCs so closely what exactly is the point of a console?
AMD X86 CPU, AMD graphic chip, DDR memory, windows 8 , internet - add keyboard and mouse and voila - PC.
And then all of a sudden 500$ doesn't sound so expensive anymore.

The way I see it, the console is just reference hardware. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if, at some point, you can "download" PlayStation on your PC or Mac and use is the same way you use Steam.

[Timman_24]

Jimmy Fallon played it last night, so the talk of "vapor ware" or it just being a concept is out. Of course they didn't show the box, so it was probably running on a PC, but it shows that the stuff they showed is playable.

I, however, was very impressed by the conference. They talked spec in a way that the layman could understand, they showed a ton of games, they showed some UI, and they left enough hidden to have a good E3 presentation.

Also the comments about "it's a pc in a box", well is it supposed to be some exotic mash up of esoteric parts wrapped in silly names like the emotion engine and graphics synthesizer? Devs have been calling for off the shelf hardware forever. Sony seems to have taken what's best in the PC world without having to adhere to standards such as atx sizes or ddr3. I'm pretty excited to see what they do with it, much more so than when the ps3 was announced.

[Timman_24]

I was thinking that perhaps the move to x86 hardware is due to the gaiki initiative they have been pushing. Running the games directly on off the shelf server hardware would be much more efficient than having to virtualize a nonstandard hardware setup.

[ImaNihilist]

Jimmy Fallon played it last night, so the talk of "vapor ware" or it just being a concept is out. Of course they didn't show the box, so it was probably running on a PC, but it shows that the stuff they showed is playable.

I, however, was very impressed by the conference. They talked spec in a way that the layman could understand, they showed a ton of games, they showed some UI, and they left enough hidden to have a good E3 presentation.

Also the comments about "it's a pc in a box", well is it supposed to be some exotic mash up of esoteric parts wrapped in silly names like the emotion engine and graphics synthesizer? Devs have been calling for off the shelf hardware forever. Sony seems to have taken what's best in the PC world without having to adhere to standards such as atx sizes or ddr3. I'm pretty excited to see what they do with it, much more so than when the ps3 was announced.

I don't know about that. I was in a room full of non-tech folk and they were all like, "What the hell are they saying? It's like buzzword bingo."

They showed a ton of trailers, not much in terms of games. The UI they showed was just a Steam Big Picture clone.

[Recon]

This is actually good news for PC Gaming. The X86 architecture makes porting a smooth process. I hope MS follows suit and uses PC architecture.

Its funny because Xbox took a beating when it first came out for being too much like a PC.