Thoughts on PS4


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Unless by life cycle you mean the point in which a new model is introduced, which I think you do ;)

Precisely. I use the term lifespan because once the new consoles come out, the old ones are out of the limelight, even if they do still sell well and are still supported. Sorry about the confusion.

-Spenser

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In the UK, the the most you can get is 20Mbps for ?36 a month, that's $70USD, which is severely capped.

Just because Japan has amazing broadband it doesn't mean the rest of the world does, and Sony needs to cater for everyone.

I live in the UK and I get 24Mbit for ?18 a month (plus ?10 BT line rental - still ?8 cheaper than what you're stating).

Not disagreeing with what you're saying, though, I don't expect to see my kind of connection being the standard for quite some time.

I notice a lot of you are throwing out random specs without thinking about what actually makes a games console good. Look at the PS3 now - it's actually a ridiculously powerful machine, does it really NEED "more CELL"? If developers are having trouble tapping into it's full potential as it stands, throwing in more megahertz isn't going to make things much better.

More RAM is always good and that's going to happen for all sorts of reasons - mainly because RAM prices are dropping quite nicely, but expect Sony to pull something similar to what they do with the PS3 now - 2 kinds of RAM that are better suited for different tasks (incidentally, the Wii and the PS3 did something similar). I'd expect them to have something like 512Mb of superfast RAM and maybe 2Gb of "Regular" system RAM. This is actually more useful and powerful than having say 4Gb of "regular" RAM as you can do all sorts of cool things when you have access to stupidly fast memory.

I don't think Sony needs to really touch the CELL, the CELL is powerful enough as it is - the PS3's real weak spot is it's graphics Chip. That's not to say it isn't very good, it is, but the 360's is a good bit faster and that came out a year before.

I'd expect Sony to work with AMD or Nvidia on a graphics chip dedicated for their next console - a bit like Microsoft did with (then) ATI. I'd mainly expect Nvidia as this means they could more easily keep backwards compatibility with the PS3, plus with Nvidia's CUDA programming architecture, it'd be theoretically a boatload easier (and faster) to produce emulators for past consoles as well, if they were so inclined.

By the time this rolls around, they'll be able to use the exact same CELL design, but ramp up the clock speed due to newer manufacturing processes, there's no real need to change the design or add more SPU's into the mix, not unless someone finds a way of making games easily multi-threaded.

The Blu-Ray drive will, of course, be faster but I would expect installations to still be around as hard drives are ALWAYS going to be faster to read than an optical drive. No doubt, "ultra HD" will be all the range and that means higher resolutions, which means more data to be loaded. Even a 10x BR wont be nearly as fast as a hard drive.

The hard drive MIGHT be Solid State, but I wouldn't bet on it, it all depends on how cheap flash memory gets in the next few years.

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Not unless that becomes popular amongst televisions. And for that to happen, people need something to put on said TV's, which would likely be BR films of some description, which would likely require new hardware in most cases so in other words - no.

I don't think we'll see a big shift away from 1080p before UltraHD becomes standard.

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