After having seen the Sony PlayStation conference today, I'm pretty impressed. Not necessarily with the system or the actual showing at the conference, but with the overall attitude Sony has this time around. Note, that I am not a console developer and never have been. I've never had access to dev kits and I've barely even been making games, but I'm currently trying to make one right now...

The biggest thing is it seems like Sony is dropping the hubris from the PS3 and now they're back on earth and really trying to get developers on their side. Do you guys remember those ridiculous demos from the PS3 unveiling? Didn't quite seem obvious at the time, but they were literally just doing massive smoke and mirrors and those entire conferences screamed "Hey, we're the best and there ain't nothing you can do about it." Mark Cerny leading the PS4 design? Seems like a fantastic choice. From what I've read about him, he seems like the real deal; someone who has been in the trenches to build games and helped a ton of people in/around Sony with building their games.

Maybe Sony has learned how important it is to get developers on your side this time around. The system is exciting to me from a technical perspective, at least, from the memory bandwidth perspective. Some of the connectivity services seem like they will get a lot more attention than the PS3 did.

Not a very coherent post, but when I was done watching the event, I was just really impressed by the way Sony handled the whole thing. Pretty well focused and it seemed very developer centric. Sort of a "Hey, we know we tortured you guys the last time around, but this time, we're going to do it right." I feel like the ball is totally in Microsoft's court now. Very excited to see what happens in the coming months from Microsoft.

What about you guys? Agree? Disagree? Impressed? Underwhelmed?

Impressed.

Though I wonder if there is any drawback for having GDDR5 for all the memory. As far as I understand, GDDR was designed with graphics in mind, but I don't know how different it is with normal "general usage" DDR.

I only know it means massive bandwidth though. Nobody confirmed bus width right?

For lazy people like my that were hoping for a link ;)

http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/130221a_e.pdf

The 8-core x64 CPU is very nice when it comes to porting code between PC and PS4... but at the same time I'm kinda sad not to see an Uber-Cell CPU in there

Hm... While 176Gb/s isn't on the bleeding edge (Titan's 288 Gb/s anyone? :D) it still way faster than desktop PC's bandwidth.

Anyway, yeah, I thought they would roll out a POWER7 4-8 core CPU with 4 threads per core.

Though no wonder why Kojima Productions suddenly wanted to roll out their multi platform Metal Gear Solid :P

I was very impressed. I just may pick one up. They did say they would be indie friendly as well.

I think the whole unvailing was a bit meh... The graphics don't really tell you much since at previous Sony launches they have been running at 4 or 5 fps and then speeded up.
The campaign by console manufaturers to clamp down on second hand games is a turn off. I think big budget consoles have lost a lot of their glitz this generation I don't think there is as much hype as their used to be. Sure there are a few die hard gamers going on line to watch it but it isn't the same as the PS3, 360, Wii launch where every person in the street knew everything about it.

On the plus side the hardware should be really simple to develop for unlike previous machines which had wierd power pc or mips which were a little wierd to develop for. At least with this configuration even if you have to hand code in Assembley it wouldnt be too difficult because its an architecture everybody is familar with.

On the plus side the hardware should be really simple to develop for unlike previous machines which had wierd power pc or mips which were a little wierd to develop for. At least with this configuration even if you have to hand code in Assembley it wouldnt be too difficult because its an architecture everybody is familar with.

Eh, at this point with the X360 and PS3 having been around for years thye people in the positions where they would be doing that work are already pretty well versed in the PowerPC and SPU assembly.

To me going to x64 just means I suddenly have no registers to play with
(Infact of the archs I've been exposed to x86/x64 is my least favorite; I still miss the MC68000 CPU and the SPU instruction set was nice to play with to.)


Personally, CPU hardware wise, I would have liked to have seen an Uber-Cell; 4 normal hardware threads + 14+ SPU paired with a GPU - cover all the based for workloads.

PS 4 will be discounted next year like Vita

x86, UMA, with a AMD GPU?

Interesting. Although the big question on everyone's lips has yet to be answered:

'will it be running windows 8?'

Hope it goes well for them though, it's a shame to see Sony bleeding money at the moment.

lol nono, it won't run Windows 8, it will run Microsoft Blue :P