PS4 Rumors, APU 'Liverpool' Radeon HD 7970 GPU Steamroller CPU 16GB

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The hardware

If something is a goal for me was that it was getting hold of a photograph of the PlayStation 4 itself, but this is sadly failed. The PlayStation 4 is still only on paper but a console for developers and only a select few people know how the device actually really look like. Sony also find it not necessary to the looks of the PS4 to share with developers, because here they simply have nothing. Of course, Sony then also a good point, but this is obviously bad for us.

What I have got is a very comprehensive document on the specifications of the PlayStation 4. Thus, the PlayStation 4 AMD Fusion APU get with the CPU and GPU sit together on the same chip. The code name for this chip is 'Liverpool' According developers would chip in "real talk" over 10x longer than that of the PS3 can. It would be a quad-core AMD x86 CPU running at 3.2GHz which contain the code name 'Steamroller' know. The GPU is an ATI r10xx at 800MHz with 1843 GFLOPS, this is code-named "Tahiti." This chip is also include on AMD Radeon HD 7970, both chips (CPU and GPU) are 28nm processors.

In terms of memory, there is much uncertainty with the PlayStation 4, as was the initial plan for Sony 2GB unified memory in the machine to stop. This is still only a point for discussion and developers ask whether this really can be brought up to 4GB, these choices are viewed by Sony. For comparison, the Wii you would to contain 1.5 GB of memory.

In terms of disc drive the PlayStation 4 will again be equipped with Blu-Ray, the space offers a Blu-Ray disc (50GB) is in fact still remains enough and so we use this technology. The back of the PS4 you will have a HDMI 1.4 port to put in and it will have a maximum output of 1080 and not the aforementioned 2048p.

In total, during the launch two PlayStation 4 are available, both are only equipped with a hard drive larger than 320GB. In terms of bundles, there are no concrete plans at Sony. What the exact difference between the two we do not know, but this is probably just the hard drive size. Also, the PS4 will have a special place for patches, OS etc this is stored on an internal 16 GB of flash storage.

http://translate.goo...pecificaties%2F

[Astra.Xtreme]

Oh noes, it's a scouser! Decent sounding specs though.

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

i really hate rumors and speculation.

in any case, i think Sony would be wise to at least support higher-than-1080p resolutions

[HawkMan]

i really hate rumors and speculation.

in any case, i think Sony would be wise to at least support higher-than-1080p resolutions

You're not gonna see adoption of 4k in the home within the next 6 years, not to any meaningful degree thta makes it worth the cost. It also wouldn't realistically with todays tech have the power to run next gen games at 4k anyway.

[fintechfooty]

Oh noes, it's a scouser! Decent sounding specs though.

Are you kidding!? The HD 7970 represents our team under Rodgers my friend! :p

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

You're not gonna see adoption of 4k in the home within the next 6 years, not to any meaningful degree thta makes it worth the cost. It also wouldn't realistically with todays tech have the power to run next gen games at 4k anyway.

i didnt necessarily mean the games had to run at 4k - but some support would be nice. kind of like the PS3 supports 1080p, but [most] games run at 720p

keep in mind, too, that the PS4 probably wont come out until 2014... then Sony is going to make it another "10 year console" pushing it into the next decade. i sure as hell hope 4k is the standard by then...

[Andre S. Veteran]

Those are surprisingly good looking specs, except for the possible 2GB of memory. If they adopt 4GB then that will be a very fine gaming system and about as large a step forward in performance one could have expected.

... assuming, of course, a timely release. 2014 would make it already quite behind the curve. :/

[scratch42069]

Am I correct in thinking PS4 will be cheaper at launch with these specs than the PS3 was?

[HawkMan]

i didnt necessarily mean the games had to run at 4k - but some support would be nice. kind of like the PS3 supports 1080p, but [most] games run at 720p

keep in mind, too, that the PS4 probably wont come out until 2014... then Sony is going to make it another "10 year console" pushing it into the next decade. i sure as hell hope 4k is the standard by then...

Like the PS2 and PS4, the console has a 10 year lifecycle, but it'll be replaced after 5-6, this generation has been surprisingly long. I wouldn't expect the next one to be as long at the rate technology is advancing and the rate the price of technology is dropping. withing 5 years, they'll be able to have a new console that can play all the games from the previous gen and be many times as powerful for the same price.

[HawkMan]

Those are surprisingly good looking specs, except for the possible 2GB of memory. If they adopt 4GB then that will be a very fine gaming system and about as large a step forward in performance one could have expected.

... assuming, of course, a timely release. 2014 would make it already quite behind the curve. :/

4 times the amount of the PS3, don't think of memory in the PC sense. consoles don't have those limitations. and technically since the PS3 doesn't have unified memory you could effectively say it has 8 times as much.

[HawkMan]

Am I correct in thinking PS4 will be cheaper at launch with these specs than the PS3 was?

Should be just because Sony isn't wasting money on a dead end processor(for console gaming and the purposes they intended. great for other purposes)

[Andre S. Veteran]

4 times the amount of the PS3, don't think of memory in the PC sense. consoles don't have those limitations. and technically since the PS3 doesn't have unified memory you could effectively say it has 8 times as much.

4 times the amount of the PS3 isn't that much for a 7-8 year gap, and for a platform that's supposed to set the standard for another who knows how many years. Game dev is limited by console specs so the higher the better. Crytek was hoping for 8GB and they know their stuff. You can ask any engine dev at EA, Ubi they will tell you the same thing.

As for unified memory , developers used 100% of the PS3 memory all right, making it unified will simplify programming but doesn't magically make you able to load twice bigger levels, more enemies, larger textures etc.

[helios01]

It will be hard to do backwards compatibility if this is true. On the bright side, Sony could probably sell this for half the price of a release PS3 when it releases.

[HawkMan]

4 times the amount of the PS3 isn't that much for a 7-8 year gap, and for a platform that's supposed to set the standard for another who knows how many years. Game dev is limited by console specs so the higher the better. Crytek was hoping for 8GB and they know their stuff. You can ask any engine dev at EA, Ubi they will tell you the same thing.

As for unified memory , developers used 100% of the PS3 memory all right, making it unified will simplify programming but doesn't magically make you able to load twice bigger levels, more enemies, larger textures etc.

Yeah, developers were hoping for more back then to, and they did fine with what they got, remember consoles need to be affordable. and even if the parts only cost a little bit more, every little bit adds up.

And yes, it actually does let you load up larger textures, since it lets the graphics card access all of the memory faster at once. as it once it needed to switch back and forth a lot of things. and the cpu couldn't use the graphics memory at all. which is rarely necessary, but sometimes useful.

[scratch42069]

Should be just because Sony isn't wasting money on a dead end processor(for console gaming and the purposes they intended. great for other purposes)

Good to know. Price was the factor when PS3 launched for me. It was out of my league and I went with a 360 instead. Even though I find the specs a bit underwhelming for a console expected to launch in 2014, I will probably get it if it's priced right.

[Andre S. Veteran]

Yeah, developers were hoping for more back then to, and they did fine with what they got

Yes, they did 720p games capped at 30fps with more or less blurry textures for the most part.

remember consoles need to be affordable. and even if the parts only cost a little bit more, every little bit adds up.

That's Sony's problem to figure out!

And yes, it actually does let you load up larger textures, since it lets the graphics card access all of the memory faster at once. as it once it needed to switch back and forth a lot of things. and the cpu couldn't use the graphics memory at all. which is rarely necessary, but sometimes useful.

It's an improvement - but it's not like having twice the memory and far from it.

[HawkMan]

Yes, they did 720p games capped at 30fps with more or less blurry textures for the most part.

More memory would not have fixed EITHER of those issues. in fact both of them where pretty mucht he results of Sony's Cell experiment. and well the fact that more than 720 would be to expensive back then. And many games run at 60, so... in fact some of the best looking games do.

Yeah sony needs to magically figure out how to make expensive computer parts free :rolleyes: remember consoles aren't made for just the hardcore gamer, it's made for everyone, they can't be expensive, and thy can't lose to much money on it, they're still suffering from the PS3 losses.

Twice the memory was NEVER an option, in fact half the memory was the more likely option at launch.

as for 8 gigs, even gaming computers today don't need that much. it's nice to have, but not necessary. and with the lack of overhead on a console, 4 GB will be more than enough.

[Andre S. Veteran]

More memory would not have fixed EITHER of those issues. in fact both of them where pretty mucht he results of Sony's Cell experiment. and well the fact that more than 720 would be to expensive back then.

The Xbox 360 suffered similar limits and it's a straightforward 3 cores. Cell made it harder to program for but it wasn't the main limiting factor. A 1920x1080 frambuffer takes 2.25 times as much memory as a 1280x720 framebuffer. Modern engines are based on deferred shading, i.e. each operation goes in its own framebuffer. The main reason you can't go 1080p on console is because you more than double the amount of memory you spend on framebuffers, so you have to drastically cut somewhere else, so most engines would rather go 720p and have nicer post-processing, animations, textures, etc. There's also processing time of course but the memory is the most limiting factor.

I don't know what you're trying to defend here, have you worked on a console engine or any game engine for that matter? Textures are blurry on console because they are low-resolution, and they are low-resolution because a higher-res textures takes more memory. Framerate is the same thing, anything you do to take less memory you have to compensate with more processing, that's just a general principle in programming. Games used to use the .wav format back in 1996 because cpus were too slow to decompress on the fly.

A large part of the challenge of making a video game engine for Xbox 360 or PS3 is making smart compromises about memory usage because it is so scarce. That's just how it is. If we want a large leap in graphical fidelity it'll require a large leap in memory.

[HawkMan]

the xbox didn't suffer to nearly the same degree, it did yes. but as I said. adding more power would have been far to expensive to make it sellable hardware. also MS started makign money on their hardware and has made back their entire investment since then. Sony is still paying some loans I believe or recently paid them all back, and that includes selling all of their stakes in the Cell.

However you're forgetting something very important, yes it was a "straight forward" 3 core.(well with 2 threads per core, and being a Power5 Architecture and nothing like what game devs have used before and with a new unified memory structure they've never seen before, but lets ignore those tiny little things first). When the 360 launched. Pretty much NO game developers had ANY experience in threaded multi core coding. it wasn't yet used to much degree on computers, and what usage there was there was very primitive in comparison.

either way the important thing here is cost. and devices need to be affordable for everyone. I doubt either MS nor Sony wants to go with as high starting price points as they did last gen. It leave sonly the hardcore gamers willing to invest. which limits the devs willing to develop with the massive userbase on existing consoles. and it means they have to have higher loss per device. Except this generation to launch with cheaper devices that leads to positive earnings per console a lot faster, witht he expectation to build a user base far faster than last gen. Gaming is no longer limited to "gamers". gaming is now for everyone, meanign the consoles need to be made and priced for everyone, from the start.

This may lead to shorter but backwards compatible generations. IE imagine 3-4 years after Xbox 720, the xbox 1080 launches, but the 720 will still be able to run 1080 games, but with lower res lower textures, and lower shaders. just like a computer game has high, medium and low settings. consoles and console games could be designed, so xbox gen 3 can run Gen 4 games, at medium and gen 5 games at low.

8 gigs would be cool, not all that useful and completely unrealistic from a cost vs effectiveness perspective. yes it would be nice, but the gains are to small, especially since you lose such a large early adopter market that aren't willing to go higher price for some technical value they don't even understand, and has no meaning to them.

And 4 gig is enough to run high textures. I think you'll find that extremely few, if any of your computer games will ever use as much as 4 gig, in most cases they're not even capable, some are with "hacks", and the only ones really making use of it is MMO's, and then it's mostly in city hubs where you have 100's of unique players. of course that results in performance lag anyway, since even if you have the memory, you just don't have the memory bandwidth to transfer all of it fast enough.

Also no texture ever needs to be higher res than the screen surface it'll take up. zoom on rifles and such can complicate this if you're standing right next to them and zoom in on their face. But that's a situation you can never fix, and where a mix between proper textures and procedurals are better anyway.

Anyway my point is that fighting for 8 gig is a waste, it'll never happen and isn't necessary, and it won't happen because it isn't necessary, and because it kills the bottom line and slows adoption.

[DirtyLarry Veteran]

4 times the amount of the PS3 isn't that much for a 7-8 year gap, and for a platform that's supposed to set the standard for another who knows how many years. Game dev is limited by console specs so the higher the better. Crytek was hoping for 8GB and they know their stuff. You can ask any engine dev at EA, Ubi they will tell you the same thing.

If I get 4x Uncharted 3, I will be happier then a pig in ****.

My point being is people tend to still refer to the PS3 as some underpowered console, which even if it is on paper, it still produces glorious results.

So yeah, I am fine with that.

[Xerino]

hmmm x86 architecture and possible 4GB ram? dont think thats gonna work folks.... and in my case where 1080p requires perfect 20/20 vision for optimum enjoyment and clarity... 2048p or whatever resolution the people want it to run at is pointless..

[Veiva]

Drop Cell and go to AMD? I doubt it. You'd lose all backwards compatibility with the previous generations (again). Let me explain:

The Cell architecture is a branch of the PowerPC. You'd go from high performance PowerPC instructions to ancient x86 ones, that make little to no sense in a game machine... You can't emulate the Cell architecture to any reasonable degree on x86, either. Not at equal performance to a native PS3.

Also, I doubt Sony can afford a "FIVE HUNDRED US DOLLAR" console again. They are bleeding money. The next console generation is likely to be more conservative. I'm not saying they're going to be a minor improvement, but they aren't going to be on par with high-end gaming rigs of the time like the Xbox 360 and PS3 were.

[HawkMan]

hmmm x86 architecture and possible 4GB ram? dont think thats gonna work folks.... and in my case where 1080p requires perfect 20/20 vision for optimum enjoyment and clarity... 2048p or whatever resolution the people want it to run at is pointless..

What exactly do you think x86 will do worse than Cell ?

You have to remember that for a game programmer the cell is a horrible architecture. it's not very effective for the stuff it needs to do. the whole idea behind the cell was that it was supposed to do everything including graphics, so it was designed to do a lot of small parallel stuff and similar things, basically it sort of works like a graphics card, just horrible. which is what sony figured out, so they had to ditch that idea at the last minute and throw a graphics card in there, leaving it with a decent graphics card and a CPU that isn't very good at doign what the CPU is supposed to do in gaming. though it can do distributed calculations of the human genome like a champ, that just isn't very useful for most games.

X86 however is, as an architecture, far better for doing the kind of calculations you need in a game. Now combined with a powerful graphics card(well yeah you can get better CPU's and graphics card in a PC, at least by launch, but they also work with far more overhead and other thigns) and you have one hell of a gaming machine. And one where the devs don't have to do black magic to make it work like they want to, and they can use the normal and better threading systems and multi core concepts they know and use from every other platform on this platform.

Yes, it'll probably not be able to emulate the PS3, but it'll be able to outperform it in games by far.

Also computers run 4 GB of ram and x86 at 1080p and more with high graphics just fine today, and that's on computers with windows in the background and all kinds of API overhead and shared resources and all that. I think we'll be fine.

[Veiva]

X86 however is, as an architecture, far better for doing the kind of calculations you need in a game. Now combined with a powerful graphics card(well yeah you can get better CPU's and graphics card in a PC, at least by launch, but they also work with far more overhead and other thigns) and you have one hell of a gaming machine. And one where the devs don't have to do black magic to make it work like they want to, and they can use the normal and better threading systems and multi core concepts they know and use from every other platform on this platform.

Yes, it'll probably not be able to emulate the PS3, but it'll be able to outperform it in games by far.

Also computers run 4 GB of ram and x86 at 1080p and more with high graphics just fine today, and that's on computers with windows in the background and all kinds of API overhead and shared resources and all that. I think we'll be fine.

x86 is not a better architecture for games. It is so full of useless cruft from ye olde ancient DOS days and compatibility instructions, that it just not worth it. PowerPC is the adopted platform for the game industry for a multitude of reasons. RISC is much better than x86 in the embedded world. They're more efficient at what they do.

[HawkMan]

The Cell architecture is a branch of the PowerPC. You'd go from high performance PowerPC instructions to ancient x86 ones, that make little to no sense in a game machine... You can't emulate the Cell architecture to any reasonable degree on x86, either. Not at equal performance to a native PS3.

Also, I doubt Sony can afford a "FIVE HUNDRED US DOLLAR" console again. They are bleeding money. The next console generation is likely to be more conservative. I'm not saying they're going to be a minor improvement, but they aren't going to be on par with high-end gaming rigs of the time like the Xbox 360 and PS3 were.

Yes, they'll lose backwards compatibility, but power architecture isn't magically better than x86 as you think, for certain things it is, but not universally. and the Cell worked in an entirely different way anyway. they're not going to be using the Cell. it's to different and to difficult to use and not efficient for gaming use. So they'll drop the Cell architecture for a far more affordable and far more powerful X86 system, which true won't have the power to emulate a completely different architecture. so if you want tpolay PS3 games, get a PS3, PS4 games, get a PS4.

And no they can't afford another 500 dollar console, that's why they're ditching the cell(well one of many very good reasons), but remember a console can have about/less than half the hardware power of a PC, and still outperform it. so at launch they may very well be on par. Especially since developers will be better able to tap the power of the consoles right off the bat since they'll use familiar architectures for the most parts with some custom stuff. though the first year probably won't be as pretty as they can be anyway since they'll have shorter dev times, and the devs still won't be entirely sure how much power they can squeeze out of the systems, but they'll start out higher than the 360 and PS4 did(yes, I fully expect the 360 to always go x86 this gen as rumored, in fact they'll probably both go with very similar AMD systems since that's what AMD is selling them on and they're the king of APU atm since Intel's graphics sucks and Nvidia only do graphics)