Sony PlayStation® 4
Out of context: Reply #111
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- scarabin0
developer-type guy from reddit:
"From the sounds of it they're going to use an AMD 8 core bulldozer with a 7850 on chip fusion product"
his whole post is interesting, actually:
"It seemed more like the full version was aimed at developers than consumers. From the sounds of it they're going to use an AMD 8 core bulldozer with a 7850 on chip fusion product (which is fine), but once that goes to globalfoundries they aren't going to be able to keep it secret. So they may as well do a quick announcement, make sure developers are all on the same page, and work from there. It means the PS4 is basically a top end gaming laptop. They may as well put ubuntu on it and call it a PC at this point. Thats important for those of us who aren't in the know with their secret plans but may still want to do a PS4 release. It means the computers we've built and been targeting for next gen are... fine. Not a lot of 8 core CPU's floating around these days but a 6 core intel will be 'close enough' for indie teams.
From E3 to christmas really isn't long enough to get a game optimized and ready. This gives them enough time to give developers a clue what they're going to work with, and squash any crazy rumours, and it gives us a few things to target if we want a PS3 release. It means we can develop on regular PC's and don't need a dozen development kits RIGHT NOW.
One of the questions those of us who aren't in the know had was what architecture they were going with. Sony could have gone with something like an 8 or 12 core ARM with some wacky Qualcomm GPU or a Tegra part or ... some custom architecture that would just make life hard. Basically they could have just taken the PSVita and made more of it, which would be ok, or they could have gone Cell 2.0 and that would have been... troublesome. Or they could have gone somewhere really strange with god knows what.
Going ARM wouldn't be a problem particularly, but it would mean we would need a dev kit ASAP to make anything that takes full advantage of the system.
Everything they said was very interesting because it was very boring. They're not going off the deep end of crazy on their hardware this time, which is boring, but a huge stress reliever. Games, that can wait until E3 when consumers are there with some expectations."
- This makes sense - I figured the next gens would havwe to do something particularly epic in the GPU dep't.detritus