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Yet more rumours regarding Sony’s upcoming PS4 have appeared today, filling in some of the details regarding the machine’s previously leaked AMD internals.
According to sources speaking to IGN’s gaming division, the next-generation PlayStation will be running custom versions of AMD’s A8-3850 APU and the Radeon HD 7670 GPU.
In its current retail form, the A8-3850 is based around a quad-core 2.9GHz chip, which would allow Sony to use the buzz surrounding quad-core devices as a big marketing hook. Unless, that is, we’re all carrying octo-core smartphones around with us by the end of 2013, when PS4/Orbis is apparently scheduled to arrive.
The DirectX 11 capable 7670 GPU, meanwhile, is at the lower end of the power levels achieved by today’s PC graphics cards. But once optimised and freed from the legacy world of PC operation, it ought to provide a big enough leap to keep console gamers happy for a few more years. [IGN via Techradar]
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So is it worth getting a PS3 now?
Yet one more rumour for the hardware engineers at Sony to piss themselves laughing at it.
Are we to infer from this post’s title that the PS4 is somehow less worthy than the PS3 because it uses more off-the-shelf technology? As with so many products, people will buy turds as long as they’re “bespoke” turds.
It was a good move by Apple, and it is a good move for Sony.
As I understand it, off the shelf technology has the positive factors of being relatively cheaper to produce (little custom technology to develop and manufacture) and that developers should have some experience dealing with the hardware and won’t have to begin from scratch to start getting the most out of it. This was certainly the case with the first XBox, which was in essence a Pentium 3 PC with a tacked on Xbox frontend (although the fact that it used this kind of hardware lead to people looking at available data sheets for the technology and exploiting its weaknesses for bootloaders and piracy – if you get some time do watch the great Google Talk by Michael Steil on Hacking the Xbox)
My whole bug bear with PS3′s Cell technology was that it was supposed to be something amazing but didn’t exactly blow people away and it was widely reported that developers were struggling to get to grips with it – despite it having a much touted “multi core” processing engine. It also lead to the wonderful 599 USD entry price for the Playstation, which also spawned a great meme at the time because of such a high asking price. Given that Sony do like to make their own hardware whenever possible, I would expect them to consider something bespoke for the PS3 but as costs of doing this are high, it wouldn’t surprise me that they are considering an off the shelf solution.
Because it can be seen as comparable to a PC with similar specifications, the PS4 hardware allows itself to be criticized by being underpowered by the time it will be released. For example, my two year old PC is a Core i5 PC with Radeon 5770 and I would expect it to be faster than this proposed PS3. By the time the PS4 comes out, I will probably be on an 8-core machine with a much faster graphics card.
Argh, wish I could edit my PS3 / PS4 mistakes…
Off the shelf components only really save the development costs, with the volume of numbers we are talking about for a popular games console it is actually cheaper to have a custom setup as you have better bargaining power.
Didn’t know that Hoggleboggle. Cheers for the heads up!
Holy shit… They both are going to be that bad?! God… 10 years more of shitty console port PC games… This is just sad…
This would be nuts of Sony to do. The Cell Processor and their implementation of it to take over the processing that is normally done by the GPU should also make it perfectly scalable. They would be better off sticking with the current PS3 setup but up the available RAM to 2GB and double or triple the Cell processors. It would allow developers to keep all the effort they put into developing for cell architecture and expand on it, would allow for minimal development costs meaning they can be profitable very quickly and are more likely to beat MS in their launch price and it would mean all the money pumped into developing the cell architecture wouldn’t be wasted either keeping stock holders and everyone else happy.