Mark Cerny is leading the design on Sony’s PlayStation 4 and he’s an incredibly smart guy. He’s given an interview to TechOn in which he goes into a little more detail about the PS4’s architecture and why it’s not quite as simple as just throwing some decent PC parts in a fancy case.
The PS4 is built around a PC architecture but that’s not the whole story. While they avoided anything that presented developers with problems to solve, Cerny says they “certainly employed our own distinguished technologies for the PS4.”
So, in the example given, they avoided eDRAM on the chip so as to avoid making developers choose which data needs to be shunted to which kind of memory. That’s one less decision to make during programming and it’s one less “puzzle” to solve.
The PS4 design team are “claiming that our company is leading innovations” though, so they’re certainly not just throwing bigger numbers at the problems and hoping to come out on top – there’s some proprietary parts involved in eking out the most from the hardware.
In the examples Cerny mentions, and he’s very technically minded so it’s not always easy for the less gifted among us to follow, he mentions structures which handle the processes between CPU and GPU. Mostly, they make decisions about what data to prioritise over multiple layers, how to reduce the number of times that needs to be sent back and forth, how quickly it is handled and when the CPU should take over from the GPU.
While much of this is over my head, and all of it is irrelevant until we see and play the differences it makes in games, it’s very encouraging to hear that Sony is focussed on two things. First, fostering innovation at the very base of their technical advancement and, second, making things as simple as possible for developers.
gazzagb
I think the best thing about having Cerny as the PS4’s lead architect is that he’s simultaneously making a game for it too. That seems to be why he’s concentrating so hard on making it easier for developers to use, he has first hand experience of what makes a console good for devs.
DuffyBox
Sony really have learned a huge amount from the problems with the PS3, hopefully this experience shall allow the PS4 to shoot out of the gates and be in a strong position right from the start.