Sony Announces Playstation 4

I have all PS from day one. PS3 got less attention than the previous.
It's more of a social hub for me, as one day of week friends gather to play a game or two.
I think i will buy it and if the rumors about the price are correct, i bet it will be a huge success.
 
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my ps3 has rotted mostly. it was fired up for valykre chronicles, and now ni no kuni. i did buy alot of ps1 classics but just havent had a chance to play them. will be watching the ps4 go on its merry way without my money going anywhere close to it.
 
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Current PCs can't even emulate the X360/PS3, let alone the next gen. Wii and PS2 can be emulated though.

Emulation is only absolutely required because they are attempting to run operating systems compiled for a very different architecture. From the looks of it, these will be x64 architectures in all but name and so full-blown emulation may not even be a nescessary step if the system software can be succesfully tricked into accepting third party drivers. Some hardware components though - proprietary items such as unique system identifiers and controller interfaces in some cases - may require some hardware emulation but this is trivial in comparison to past challenges of emulating a full non x64-x86 compatible console hardware setup in software on a PC.
 
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Hope. A game optimized for 8 cores, well will not port very nicely to a quad or 6 core PC easily. Whether devs actually optimize for all those cores is something yet to be determined. But the underlying PC architecture will make some of the porting easier.
 
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Keep in mind that many PCs are already capable of running 8 threads simultaneously, since Intel has been selling quad-core CPU's with multi-threading for some time. From software's perspective, a machine that can support 8 threads looks just like it has 8 processors to work with (which is why if you open Task Manager on a 4-core machine with multi-threading, you'll see 8 logical cores). So there shouldn't be any issue with taking software that's optimized for 8 cores and porting it to existing PC's (as long as it supports 8 threads).

FYI, folks need to be careful about what AMD calls a core.

I haven't looked into the PS4 announcement, but AMD is currently selling what it calls an 8-core processor that actually consists of 4 cores, each of which have two separate execution engines. Their marketing is calling those execution engines separate cores, even though they are fed from a single instruction issue queue.

It's basically AMD's way of implementing multi-threading, in an attempt to counter Intel's multi-threading implementation (Hyperthreading), but they're doing it with a much higher hardware cost, albeit with a theoretical increased performance.

However, benchmarks have shown that there is very little performance benefit (if any) of an AMD 8-core processor when compared to a 4-core Intel processor that implements multi-threading (ie, each core can run 2 threads concurrently). This may be due to other micro-architectural differences, though; Intel's pace of new micro-architectural releases has far outpaced AMD's recently.

This is all in regards to the PC space. I don't know if AMD is doing anything special for the PS4 (I haven't read any of the news or announcements about it), but my first guess is that they're using their existing "8-core" design, which is basically 4 instances of a core that features 2 distinct execution engines. I could be wrong, though...

And so ends your microprocessor architecture lesson for the day (sorry, I do this stuff for a living).
 
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This is all in regards to the PC space. I don't know if AMD is doing anything special for the PS4 (I haven't read any of the news or announcements about it), but my first guess is that they're using their existing "8-core" design, which is basically 4 instances of a core that features 2 distinct execution engines. I could be wrong, though…

And so ends your microprocessor architecture lesson for the day (sorry, I do this stuff for a living).

Isn't AMD supposed to have a new processor generation in late 2013-2014 (Steamroller)? Maybe Sony gave them cash to speed up the R&D (the reason why AMD pushed back that release to 2014 was lack of cash).

I wonder if they are going for APUs too.
 
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couldn't care less about the 'social' aspects, like the share button. Up to the PS2 era, developers only had to worry about making the best game they could ever make within their budget. With the PS3/Xbox 360 now they had to allocate a lot of resources into adding multiplayer support (even if the game doesn't need it, it just HAD to have it) and DLC/in-game store support. And now this next generation they have all that and now social features. I bet their budget will be half for the actual game and half for all the other crap they have to add.
 
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At the moment CPUs are no relevant factor regarding gaming performance, and they haven't been for years. The vast majority of games are GPU limited. Maybe going for this unspectacular AMD solution is a signal that this is not about to change anytime soon?
The contrast could hardly be bigger:
PS3: expensive CELL development, big, a lot of heat
PS4: variation of a cheap AMD stock solution, die shrink, underclocked to 1.6 GHz
 
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Luckily the sophistication of the "console gamer" has risen as owning a console has spread demographically. Games are less ridiculous than the old days. I no longer dread consoles really, although I still don't own one primarily due to the controller and PC gaming still thriving... I also can't do controller based FPS to save my life. Can't someone make a workable substitute???
 
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Luckily the sophistication of the "console gamer" has risen as owning a console has spread demographically. Games are less ridiculous than the old days. I no longer dread consoles really, although I still don't own one primarily due to the controller and PC gaming still thriving… I also can't do controller based FPS to save my life. Can't someone make a workable substitute???

Wish I could help but alas my console based skills with a controller is just as bad. Many say you get used to it but I never have.
 
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I actually heard it wasn't backwards compatible. You even have to rebuy PSN games you already own.

I would be surprised if you couldn't use your existing PSN account and the games that are on it unless it's because of compatibility issues. There would be too much of an uproar.
 
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Isn't AMD supposed to have a new processor generation in late 2013-2014 (Steamroller)? Maybe Sony gave them cash to speed up the R&D (the reason why AMD pushed back that release to 2014 was lack of cash).

I wonder if they are going for APUs too.

No the ps4 CPU is a derivative of the AMD jaguar. Their mobile processor made to compete with the intel atom. Th graphics are also AMD capable of 1.84 TFLOPS, less than a gtx 660 and the 8GB is shared between system and memory.

Not very impressive specs, but I'm sure they will optimize it and make some amazing looking games which will hopeful bode well for pc gamers like myself.
 
I also can't do controller based FPS to save my life.

I'm the same. Whenever I try to move a camera using a game controller I either move it way too slow or I move it way too fast. Drives me nuts.
 
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At the moment CPUs are no relevant factor regarding gaming performance, and they haven't been for years. The vast majority of games are GPU limited. Maybe going for this unspectacular AMD solution is a signal that this is not about to change anytime soon?
The contrast could hardly be bigger:
PS3: expensive CELL development, big, a lot of heat
PS4: variation of a cheap AMD stock solution, die shrink, underclocked to 1.6 GHz

Standard PC architecture is the not the most efficient in terms of latency of communication between the CPU, GPU and disk and solid state memory. Are they going to use on chip GPU-CPU architecture in PS4? That would make more sense but I don't know how much power and heat they can pack in standard CPU sockets.
 
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But how could it be backward compatible? The PS3 is based on completely different technology. Both consoles have pretty much nothing in common except for the name.
 
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But how could it be backward compatible? The PS3 is based on completely different technology. Both consoles have pretty much nothing in common except for the name.

I think that I have just read somewhere that PS4 games are not backward compatable and vise versa for PS3 games, I think it was in VG247.
 
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Standard PC architecture is the not the most efficient in terms of latency of communication between the CPU, GPU and disk and solid state memory. Are they going to use on chip GPU-CPU architecture in PS4? That would make more sense but I don't know how much power and heat they can pack in standard CPU sockets.

They're marrying notebook tech (currently 18W for 2 cores) with that 8 core CPU. Since AMD also has reasonably advanced on-CPU graphics it would make sense to use that. But is it really fast enough for 1080p already? I doubt that. So probably a 2nd chip for graphics.

The memory will be 8 GB GDDR-5, not DDR-3.
 
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