Slashdot Mirror
Sony Won't Invest As Heavily In PlayStation 4
donniebaseball23 writes "Sony CFO Masaru Kato told investors this week that the company won't be looking to put the same kind of massive R&D into PS4 as they did with PS3. PS3's costs were astronomical because of Blu-ray and the Cell chip, but Sony's bottom line can't take another similar hit. Analysts are speculating that this will leave the door open for competitors like Microsoft. 'PS4's hardware could be less impressive than the PS3 at its launch. I think Microsoft will really be able to put the screws to Sony in the next console war,' Panoptic analyst Asif Khan commented to IndustryGamers."
That's assuming that mobile phones don't become more powerful than consoles.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
What if next gen they release another whimsical wellaccepted Nintendoish system alongside a run of the mill plays COD ports system? Seems like a way to lock everything up. Pure speculation obviously.
People that want cutting edge gaming rigs buy PCs, not consoles, which are behind at launch and get further so over time.
I think there are other factors at work, and the power of the HW is at best a minor factor influencing purchase decisions.
I wonder if they are putting ANY budget into security this time?
I mean, we're doing budget cuts over every aspect right? does that mean the janitor can only work in his spare time on the security model this time?
PS4's hardware could be less impressive than the PS3 at its launch
I hope they do better on everything else, then... Not any particular X fanboy (I have all 3 current-gen consoles and all three are sitting idle for some time now), but we're... what? Almost five years into it now?... and I'm still unimpressed. There are still only exactly two exclusives in all that time that I've thought were worth playing (and the later of the two completely screwed with the formula that made the series so awesome IMNSHO).
Combined with the active hostility Sony treats its customers to since it came out, you'd think the PS4 would come with hookers and blackjack just to get people to bite.
Xbox got a huge boost out of letting Sony do the initial R&D on the Cell architecture, in collaboration with Toshiba and IBM. So when it came time for the 360 to use the Cell, most of the hard (expensive) work had already been funded largely by Sony.
I think they're probably willing to play a waiting game to see what Microsoft does, then 1up them - much cheaper to go second.
There's still plenty of life in the PS3. Hell, I'm only aware of one game that actually taxes the PS3; everything else seems to run just fine. What Sony needs to invest in at the moment is quality games. The fact that it took Polyphony Digital so long to release GT5 is pathetic.
a big comeback for Sega.. Atari? I hope they bring back Pong.. still the best game ever made
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
All consoles makers use OpenGL - except Microsoft of course. If Microsoft takes greater advantage in the console arena, it'll mean less developer mindshare on open standards in place of MS's proprietary engines. Fewer GL developers on consoles could translate to fewer GL developers for desktops as well - which is one of the main barriers to companies writing games for Linux and other non-MS platforms.
I guess anyone could give their take on which company is less evil, but it would seem to me that the ramifications of MS dominating in the console arena could be a pretty bad turn for all other gaming platforms. Sure Nintendo is still around but their scope is somewhat different from the other two.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I own a PS3. I bet on the PS3 with real money. I'm no fan of microsoft (ask anyone, anyone at all, ask everyone), and I won't buy microsoft consoles (go ahead, put screws to my fingernails, is that all ya got?), but I am not cheerful with Sony either. Rootkits, removing otheros, lawsuits against people who try to restore what they bought and paid for (when I buy an NVIDIA video card, NVIDIA does NOT get anal over what I do with the video card, when I buy an ASUS motherboard, ASUS does *NOT* get anal over what I do with the motherboard; its *NONE* of Sonys business what I do with the PS3 that *I* paid for and *I* own (and they stopped owning all of it the second *I* paid for it)! I might not be able to stop their lawyers, but I can never buy any of their products again, and I can strongly discourage anyone and everyone that I know from ever buying any of their products again. They don't have to be reasonable, and I don't have to support them.
If Sony would just stop insisting on using bizarre esoteric shit for hardware every damn generation, maybe they'd have the time and money to focus on building a powerful platform that doesn't cost six hundred dollars new and doesn't require programmers to spend 3 years figuring out how to get the damn thing to run code efficiently. Seriously, they just need to use some more common hardware and they could be right up there with Microsoft, kicking ass in the console race again. And making a profit on it.
Sony admits to a massive strategic blunder? Nintendo retreats from their "casual=king" position?
Did Microsoft just "win" this generation?
PS3 is a powerful current gen system. Although when it was first released the GPU was lacking and still is. So I hope they pick a powerful GPU especially if they are going to want to make 3D gaming a big thing for there next system.
Still in the end it is not the specs that matter, it is the quality of the games that matter.
Sony doesn't have to innovate from scratch but can do what Microsoft has been doing. Since the first XBox, they have been using the newer technologies to integrate more components on same chip - bring in GPU, bring in memory etc. The Xbox processor itself hasn't become any faster. They prefer to keep same speed but cut down power. That in turn helps with cheaper packaging and power supply. And ultimately to save cost.
They aren't investing the same amount because they aren't creating a new media type to go along with it this time around (no new Blu Ray). They also don't need to make a new processor when they can just slap more cell processors together.
Why would they invest the same amount in R&D?
I'm still finding new ways to die in Nethack!
--
BMO
Why not reuse the cell design: use the exact same chip, but manufacture it with current lithography technology, smaller structures, higher clockrate, more SPUs. It may do the trcik, and there is no new learning curve for devs. I have programmed SPUs, and they can do wonders if used correctly.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
If you remove the casing of an Xbox classic or Xbox 360 and examine its innards, you'll find out that it is nothing more than a stripped down, slightly modified gaming PC.
When it comes to creativity and innovation for console gaming, I would rather place my faith in the Japanese rather than in the Redmond folks.
Microsoft has always been a 'Me too' kind of company. Console gaming, search engine, web services, mobile OS, even office applications... you name it.
Sony didn't say that they are going to produce a less powerful design, but a design which costs less, in terms of investment.
Although the outcome may be a not-so-powerful console, the other possibility is something with less "custom" solutions.
Such as:
- Off-the-shelf CPUs/GPUs, or custom ASICs using 3rd-party licensed CPU/GPU designs (instead of designing one from scratch)
- Off-the-shelf DDR(1/2/3/4/5/whatever) SDRAM (instead of using something from Rambus)
- Blu-ray, instead of a new kind of optical disk design (or, even eliminate the physical medium altogether in favor of online purchases)
If this is true, then it is not a surprise. Sony released the PS3, the most technically advanced of all the current generation consoles, only to be outsold by the comparatively weak Wii. And in addition, games released on both PS3 and Xbox 360 generally looked better on the 360 (e.g. Bayonetta).
Sony of all companies should have known that the most technically advanced console doesn't generally perform the best in the market. Sega's Saturn had a multiprocessor architecture before most game programmers knew how to program for one and the PlayStation destroyed it in the marketplace. Similarly, the PS2 fared better in the marketplace than the technically superior Xbox and GameCube (which was primarily hampered by storage space issues like the N64 before it).
What is important is third-party support. That's what made the NES, the PlayStation, the PlayStation 2 and other successful consoles. If you have a system developers want to develop for, then you'll get the good quality titles that have people flocking to buy your system.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Less Microsoft forks money to put a bluray drive in next xbox and still sticks with dvd drive then they war is already lost. Dvd can hold so much data and graphic wise way games are getting gonna need the space a bluray disc has.
Whatever they do, the next one should be an open platform.
thats what happens when you have to spend money that could have gone to your investors to make your networks more secure.
Note that I am not passing judgment, good or bad, on the Cell. The question is how they get to the PS4 and minimize cost and risk,
Why is Snark Required?
The PS3 had a lot of power when new. But since it was such a far-out architecture, developers had to work to get to it. And developers generally aren't interested in doing so. They'd rather just port their C code over and type make.
A system that is a little less powerful but much more conventional (like Xbox 360) could easily cost less and produce better games overall, even if the absolute top levels of capability are reduced.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I'm starting to wonder if consoles are a dying breed. They used to come out every 3-5 years like clockwork, with major advances every time. Now every maker seems to be phoning it in. And if Microsoft, king of the 66% hardware failure rate is the only one that takes the next round seriously, I fear for the future.
I salivated over the release of the PS2. I have tons of games for it, and most of those are JRPGs and DDR. That console just wouldn't die, and it seemed like everyone wanted to release onto it. My Wii library is decidedly smaller, and I totally skipped out on the RROD-box and kept waiting for the PS3 to come down in price. Looking through the game libraries of each, there's only two or three games I'd even want to buy anyway, which clearly isn't worth it.
So far, both Nintendo and Sony have said "meh" to the next console round. So I have to wonder why.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
The 360s hardware is less impressive then the PS3's hardware, but it's done pretty well for itself. You can build a powerful system without blowing the budget on a whiz-bang effort that's overly expensive to produce and overly complicated for developers to leverage (ie: the PS3).
All I read from this is that Sony's learned something from what went wrong last time and is more committed to building something they can sell for a realistic price without taking huge losses. Why is that a bad thing?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'll go with whatever one I feel has the best specs. I love my ps3, but if Microsoft steps up and out powers them, I'll be moving on.
Posting this AC cause the moderators seem to be on the rag right now.
Now for my post, Sony spent a lot to include BluRay in each PS3. They were still battling Toshiba (and to some extent, Microsoft) and HD-DVD. Microsoft took the cowards way out and let it's customers decide if HD-DVD was for them or not (and worth another $100). Sony put one in the device and, long story short, HD-DVD is all but dead (just bought a new DVD drive that, for some reason, plays HD-DVDs). Sony won't have to invest as much in BluRay, it's out there and a lot cheaper. As for the processor, with die-shrinks and everything else, they could get a lot more power for the same price, or slightly less "more power" for cheaper. They don't have to re-invent the whole processor, just improve it a bit. Point is, they can afford to spend a lot less this time, and still produce an impressive machine. We'll see if Microsoft didn't shoot it's wad with Kinect, or if they have something left in the tank for their next system. As for Nintendo, well, who really knows. They've been in the "video game" business for over 30 years, and considering they were the top seller of the current generation, I'm sure they'll continue to make a profit (though what their next console will look like is anyone's guess).
...an evolution as opposed to a revolution. It'll probably be an upgrade rather than a replacement. The PS3 capability-wise was revolutionary compared to the PS2. The PS4 may only seek to improve upon it by fixing the PS3's existing faults while adding more capabilities. I'd be surprised if the PS4 wasn't backwards-compatible with PS3 only because the PS4 will be so technologically similar.
Besides which, I think that'd be the wisest path for Sony to take for their next generation console. The PS3 has only started to gain traction among mainstream gamers now, as the Wii and the 360 are hitting their respective limits. It wouldn't be good to come up with some completely new system that suddenly everyone who had bought a PS3 wouldn't be able to use. Instead, it'd be better to offer something that PS3 users might be willing to eventually upgrade to, while still attracting new users with the existing PS3 and eventually PS4 game library.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
to me.
As a purchaser of the the PS3, and having the things I paid for stripped away and my info released due to poor security, I don't care what the performance is because I wouldn't own one if Sony GAVE it to me.
you're assuming that Sony would be dumb enough to sell an inferior console at the same price as a much better one. They could pull a Nintendo Wii and sell a ton of them for a much lower price than their competition. Consumers don't really care about specs, what they care about most (by this I mean moms and dads) is that the price is less than 300 for Christmas and birthdays. I don't think the ps4 would start at 300, but 350 should be the goal. Same reason why Sony is dropping the specs of the PSP2. Lower cost=Lower price=More sold. That should be a slogan.
llano with its directx 11 capable gpu pull a microsoft and go x86
Sony has really pissed me off with all their bullshit. So much that, *I* won't be investing heavily in the PS4, either. Like not at all.
but Sony's bottom line can't take another similar hit.
They need the money for network security research.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Man, I loved my PS3 when I bought it. I pulled the trigger on the $600 console. It was shiny, new, perfect. Then I bought GTA4 and it broke the drive somehow. Drive couldnt read discs. I sent it in and waited 3 months only to be returned with a different, used console that was scuffed up and had dust under the translucent cover. I lost my enthuiasm. I play a blu-ray (bought a $1500 tv for 1080p to justify the blu ray) only to have the screeching high pitched loud fan ruin the movie experience. Then sony pulled the linux feature off right when I was going to check it out. I'm done. Combine this with the root kit and geohot crap and im done with sony. I hate to say it but I might buy an XBOX next time or stick with PC gaming.
The public won't invest as heavily in the Playstation 4 because Sony can't seem to get their shit together! =]
I'm still finding new ways to die in Nethack!
Yes, consoles. Unless you're trying to say you're one of the heathens that uses a graphical tileset for your Nethack? :-P
Yeah, all this is saying is that Sony won't be building expensive proprietary technology like Cell or Blu-ray, and esoteric technology like XDR Ram, into the PS4.
They probably are going to use off-the-shelf components like MS. Intel, IBM, ATI, Nvidia, all make components that are impressive. There is no need to develop everything from scratch in-house like the PS3. In fact, the MS tactic of using off-the-shelf components (which they have used even on the first Xbox) is clearly the way to go. Outside of a few first-party titles (Killzone, Uncharted,God of War) that look wonderful, most third-party cross-platform titles haven't bothered to tailor their development for the Cell. And as far as the disk format, there really isn't any impetus to go beyond the 50GBs that Blu-ray affords on the PS4.
The real reality is that game development costs are astronomical for AAA titles. Developing for a single platform really isn't viable, especially if they are using an esoteric architecture like the Cell. Its unreasonable to expect developers to give one platform special attention over the other, and in the same respect its unreasonable for a platform maker to build technology that will go unused into their machine as well.
Looking at the NGP, Sony seems to have adopted a plain-jane quad-core ARM cortex-A9 and a quad-core PowerVR chipset. Hardware that will be common place in the next year, Qualcomm's Snapdragon APQ8064 is similar in design, Sony clearly intends on having the Playstation Suite on Android phones converge with the NGP. Sony clearly intends on having the PS4 go a similar route.
It wouldn't be surprising if PS4 uses a ARM CortexA15 (which goes upto 16 cores) and an Nvidia chipset like "Project Denver"; Nvidia ARM/GPU hybrid. So that all development efforts PC/NGP/Android/iOS/360/Nintendo Project Cafe/PS3/PS4 can be brought under one roof. Obviously, the concept of the hardware platform itself is changing for console makers. Cross-platform tools such as Epic's Unreal Engine are becoming mini-platforms unto themselves.
No, the real heathens are the ones who use Falcon's Eye.
Isotropic rendering in my Nethack? No way, man...
--
BMO
...as much as they invested in PSN's security.
BUWHAHAHAHAHA
Does anyone know how much midgets cost? I need at least 50. 30 will be turned into make soup. 19 will be used for sex, and the last one will be my footrest.
Does anyone really care? Who is eagerly anticipating PS4? Who even cares about consoles anymore... ?
Imho, the best Sony could do would be an evolutionary step, rather than a completely new machine.
Most of the R&D on the Cell is done, and the years have provided a lot of insight into it's strengths and weaknesses. It should be (relatively) economically viable to make a newer version, which would be about the same to program as the current one, meaning a far lower learning curve. For instance, fixing any glaring bottlenecks, upgrade the General purpose parts and individual SPE's and "just" add more cores after that.
I'm certain IBM would love to be able to get a new Cell CPU, as they currently are more or less forced to use the old one, as it is cheaper due to the level of production for the PS3.
Between the PS3 and the X360 and their respective choices of GPU's, it did turn out that Microsoft made the better choice.
PS4 can still be a very powerful machine without the massive investments that went into the PS3. The biggest question is: will they sell in sufficient numbers?
Sony's reputation (flawed as it already were at the PS3 launch) have really taken some hits over the past few years. Some customers may decide they don't trust Sony any longer, and put their money elsewhere.
99% of the R&D will go to "security" a.k.a., DRM. Otherwise it'll just be a repackaged PS3.
Too scared to post that as anyone other than an Anonymous Coward? Pathetic, just as much so as an idiot who can't type. Get some guts, and I don't mean the guts that the PS3 has, they're outdated as fuck.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
Don't forget that the same processor research for CELL is what spawned the 3 core processor in the xbox360.
The PS3 launch is also the reason why we have 1080i support from the xbox.
If Sony is claiming they don't want to invest in making a revolutionary console. Does that mean we should settle and buy mediocrity?
wow, you all think the console market is dying? hello!?! stop kidding yourself, the PC gaming market had its glory days back in the late 90s/early 2000s when the cost of building a pc finally became affordable. pc gaming is starting to come back but consoles are kill them imo. gaming went mainstream in the last decade and consoles are less work; i'm a console gamer cuz i'm sick of upgrading to a new $300+ vid card every 6 months or so. 6 years on PS3, hell yea. i'll take another 3 more years on this console generation. you want the latest and greatest graphics, go back to PC but good luck getting the same games.
just my usual .02
You forgot the comma after "says", genius.
When the PS3 was in development, the Blu-Ray specs still hadn't been nailed down; the DVD was at the height of its mass market appeal. Also, when the PS3 was in development, multi-core processors were brand new technology (at least to the consumer world). WiFi was just really starting to catch on. The PS3 was the convergence of two expensive, brand-new technologies and one technology that was just getting ready for prime-time. Remember, Sony was going to put the Cell processor in EVERYTHING from the PS3 to your TV and sound system. They were all going to feed off each other, or rather share the burden of processing the gigabytes of audio and video they were going to be pumping through your living room.
Sony's CFO seems to merely be restating "we don't have to invest heavily" as "we don't want to invest heavily". The costs of putting WiFi in a new computer system are probably down in the sub-$5 range (I'm estimating high). If their new console has an optical drive, it will cost next to nothing to include. They've made significant investments in PSN already, a network that (with cheap HDDs) will probably play an increasingly important role in Sony's gaming strategy. And last but not least, multi-core processors are literally dirt cheap. I'm sure Sony won't be putting a stock i5 or i7 in their system (ala Celeron in the original Xbox).
Again, I don't see this so much as Sony saying, "Gee, we'd REALLY like to invest in this new whiz-bang technology out there, but, by gosh, we're just not going to do," but rather Sony can easily build a very powerful, next-gen system with existing, powerful, inexpensive components.
So when you look back, you discover the Cell was actually intended to be the GPU for the PS3. They thought it would be so good at stream processing that it would do the graphics. I don't know if that was wishful thinking or willful blindness but either way, we all know it didn't work out. Ended up causing a lot of trouble.
It was really a bad idea for Sony to go and design a new, experimental architecture for use in a consumer system. That is the kind of thing to try in research and maybe high end systems first, and then once it gets refined move towards mainstream.
The WSJ is a bit misleading - there is no definite information that the whole cell chip itself was used to create the Wii and 360 CPUs. However all three chips are derivatives of IBM's pre-existing PowerPC architecture (itself a subset of their POWER processors), with the Wii having by all reports a faster version of the PowerPC that was in the GameCube. The way that machines are created there's no way that research that went into one chip didn't go to improving all of IBM's other chips (and as the article suggests), but not to the extent that they would use the whole Cell architecture and give it to SCEA's direct gaming competitors (and I would have thought there would be an explicit exemption to that in the Sony-IBM contract). The wikipedia article (see below for links) is quite informative. It will tell you that the XBox used the PPE part of the Cell chip - from what I can tell the PPE is a PowerPC derivative - I previously heard that it was a custom built version of the PowerPC 970 that was the last Mac PowerPC chip. The special thing about cell is the parallel architecture, with the PPE and SPE tags causing some confusion. You can claim that some help might have been indirectly provided by Sony, but IBM has the expertise (and pre-existing relationship with Nintendo) to make the chips without Sony's funding. In summary it seems all chips have a basis in IBM's longstanding PowerPC series, with the Cell being a bit more specialised. As the specs of the chips are secret is difficult to say what exact differences there are without examining the chips in detail. Have a look at these links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Power_Processor_Element_.28PPE.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
What if they’re bluffing?
And they're actually working in secret with Sega, for the ultimate Japanese comeback?
Ha! Me neither.
I ain't ever buying anything Sony again, so it doesn't matter.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
I have seen the evil actions Microsoft has performed over the past 30 years, and Sony is an amateur by comparison.
Most corporations are in business for the money, which is far more important to them than the general public, and often even their own customers.
ps3 wasn't a 'revolutionary' console in any respect.
It is not about how big your hardware is, it is all about how you use it.
Joke aside, the most important thing for a console is having games support. If all the games I like are made for another console, I will go with that, no matter if it has eight or twenty cores, and six or ten GiB of RAM.
42.
Just give it a dx11 compatible gpu and i dont care. we need dx11 gpus on the consoles, so pc games are no longer hold back by console development.
I'm still getting dialup, DLS is 1/4 miles away and in a year gigibit network will be within a 1/2 mile. I'll be seeing none of that. Fuck the telcos and their tax credits and fees.
Sounds like time for a couple of parabolic dishes and a friendly neighbour within the gigabit coverage area...
Wait what? PS1 cd, PS2 dvd, PS3, bluray, PS4?. I demand another format for my PS4!
Sony should take a leaf out of the books of the large American corporations it competes with and outsource PS4 research and development to HCL
They could sell 95% of their R&D operation to HCL, who will be delighted to have the staff with all the skills and knowledge. Then HCL can set about assimilating that knowledge, putting armies of cheap Indian engineers on the project.
Since HCL has its fingers in so many engineering pies and has Centers of Excellence everywhere, this could be sold to the staff being transferred as a "wonderful and exciting opportunity."
After 6 to 12 months, when enough of the knowledge has been assimilated, the expensive engineers acquired from Sony could be "let go".
Both Sony and HCL would be winners, Sony reducing its costs and HCL increasing its revenue, profit and collective intellectual assets.
A win-win situation!
Do I get an MBA?
Maybe it won't cost FIVE HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE US DOLLARS then? No, I will not stop harping on that epic fail of an E3 presentation.
________
Entranced by anime since late summer 2001 and loving it ^_^
only took three generations for microsoft to take over the console market and crush competition. makes sense tho considering windows was only ever good for gaming, so fair enough i suppose.
The PPC+SPE combo units ARE the far-out architecture of the PS3 he was talking about.
He was not talking about the PPC alone.
FYI, "it's" is a contraction of "it is".
The apostrophe should not be used to indicate that an "s" is coming next.
As an owner of a 360, I don't really see much need for another console yet. One of my main concerns is will it play my older games. I'm sure as hell not going to buy the next-gen console only to find there aren't enough games and no compatibility to previous consoles.
Sony should have had a V8.
Not a big surprise really. When the PS3 came out Blu-ray was brand new, the processors were brand new, HD video was new, it was a huge leap over the previous generation console. There's nothing out now that is that big a leap for hardware. What I'd see for the PS4 would be more RAM, a hard drive bump, latest video card, and possibly more cores for the processor. Nothing revolutionary here, just upgrades.
I think all 3 consoles will be closer in terms of power. The last one to be released will be most powerful but not by much. I think Nintendo's strategy with the 'project cafe' system is to close this gap. Also if you have to sell any product at a loss, its just plain risky.
...would go into securing the PSN network.
I mean, what the statement from Sony tells me is they are going to go with more off the shelf solutions, much like they did with the NGP. This has a benefit in terms of ease of development and costs, because Developers don't have to learn a radical new architecture, and mass production costs come down much faster.
This doesn't mean it will be weaker then the Wii2 or Xbox, just that it won't be as proprietary technology wise. The extra savings could go into buying stronger parts to begin with, probably supplied by IBM/Nvidia/ATI etc.
Sony spent a lot on developing Cell, and especially on developing Blu-Ray. They can use both of those technologies in a new console without suffering anything like PS3 development costs.
Sony has been paying for die shrinks of Cell and RSX this entire generation, as they've been lowering the cost of the PS3s they are selling. Cell itself was designed to be a scalable architecture, with support for multiprocessing (i.e., multiple Cells) from the beginning. They could put a 28nm next gen Cell chip with 2 PPEs and 16 SPEs and have something decent, or they could do 4 PPEs and 8 SPEs (for backwards compatibility), or perhaps they could even take handful of Power 7 cores along with the 8 SPEs to get good branchy behavior along with the vector processing of the SPEs for backwards compatibility.
None of that should cost anything like what it cost to develop the first Cell chip.
As far as Blu-Ray, that was *expensive* when the PS3 launched. Those 405nm laser diodes were hard to come by, with really poor yield, and they cost a *lot*. Nowadays, they could put in an 8x BD drive "off the shelf", and get better performance with far, far lower costs than they had to come up with Blu-Ray in the first place.
With such a system, they could bring forward all of the software they developed in coming up with the PS3, as well. PS2 had basically no operating system, so Sony had a lot of software development costs to bring PS3 out. All that is paid for and ready to go if they wanted to go with a next gen Cell and Blu-Ray.
The GPU is going to be something modern and fast from AMD or Nvidia, so that's not development costs they'll have to incur, either. And remember that consoles don't have to worry about driving 4k monitors at higher than 60hz or anything crazy like that. Just a nice, simple 1920x1080 x 60 frames. That's easy for modern GPUs.
All in all, Sony should be able to spend far less on development costs while still fielding a very powerful next gen system. They just have to take advantage of the very significant investments they have already sunk developing PS3.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
What made the PlayStation a success was using familiar high-performance off-the-shelf parts. Developers already knew the hardware and continued to find ways to extract performance out of the combination. There were no surprises and no new paradigms (multiple core, stream co-processors, new architecture) that had to be learned to take advantage of the power. Sony was also there to help developers and even put their own experts behind popular franchises that were being developed for their console; they started this too late in the PS3's cycle to make a difference, on top of the already relatively late launch.
IMHO, this is the best route any console developer should take. What really makes a difference for a good console (besides committed in-house/3rd party developers) is not generally a radical new architecture, but its controller, software interface (GUI, etc), developer API kit (it directly affects the software lineup), online services for those who want them (online storefront, online friend management / multiplayer game service), and secondary features such as media playback interface/formats, video/music services, etc.
Twinstiq, game news
even before all the hub bub over the years I looked at a playstation 3, and what I saw was very expensive, lack of a quality controller cause I am constantly fumbling over the trigger buttons on a 6-asses, not all that much difference in the quality of games, and there for the longest time very little games.
I looked and looked and finally it popped in my head, Oh! they turned playstation into a 3DO! and bought an XBOX360 to set next to my ps1, ps2, and psp
3DO did not invest heavily into its future system either
$0.02: Wait. See what the rest does. Make your moves in response to that. Keep the architecture of the PS3. 2-4x as many CPU cores. 4-8x as many SPEs. Some general chip architecture improvements. Shop a new gfx chip that is compatible with the old one. Offer more RAM than the others. Go to 8G to make a difference from where PC games are today. Don't reinvent the wheel once more with a new cpu...
Sony dumped a ton of R&D resources into the Cell, and what they got was a processor that was not obviously superior to what their competition was doing. It was just different. Cell, as shipped, has one PPE (a general-purpose core that's almost identical to one of the 360's three cores), and eight SPEs (very simple in-order processors with no branch prediction). The SPEs are great at doing math or DSP-style processing, but horrible at general-purpose code execution. Of the eight SPEs that shipped, one is disabled to improve yields (survive manufacturing defects), and one is reserved for the OS.
The end result of this was that Cell wasn't really better or worse than the 360's Xenon, it was just better at some things, and worse at other things. There wasn't a huge difference between the GPUs in the consoles either. The only real differentiating factor between the PS3 and the 360 was the BluRay drive, but the advantages in terms of capacity that were offered were largely outweighed by by the delays they caused in the manufacturing process (although to be fair, Cell had severe yield issues early on, which also constrained supply). The storage capacity advantages were unable to counterbalance the 360's lead in marketshare, and the BluRay drive in the PS3 had some limitations; it actually has significantly lower read speeds than the DVD drive in the 360.
All this is to basically say that the success or failure of the PS3 or 360 had little to do with the specific hardware inside. It had to do with the timing of the introduction of the hardware, and the software libraries available, the pricing, and potentially cultural stigmas (such as the 360's failure in Japan). If Sony had gone with a DVD drive and more traditional (and more mature) processor in the PS3, they would likely have come to market faster, at a lower price point, and probably would have captured a decent chunk more market share in the process.
Sony is smart not to go down the same path with the PS4 as they did with the PS3. In terms of storage capacity, no significant work must be done there. BluRay has matured, and the PS4's BluRay drive can easily ship with much higher throughput rates than the PS3, as well as higher capacity (BDXL bumped up the capacity of discs from 50GB to 128GB). The processor design can be left to a third party vendor (be it Intel, AMD, ARM, or IBM). The graphics processor design wasn't theirs in the PS3 anyhow (it was nVidia's), so no major change is needed in that regard. In short, they can produce a viable successor with a relative minimum of R&D, and it'll probably do just fine.
Sony was clever with the PS3, using it to win the format war (Blu-Ray) and using it to milk two cash-cows at once (keeping both the PS2 and the PS3 going).
Unfortunately, they were a bit too greedy with the PS2 incompatibility and kept it going for far too long. They've created a situation where there was no real reason for anyone to stick with Sony. Buyers weren't going to be able to play old games on their new console, so they were free to choose an XBox or a Wii instead.
The first thing Sony should be doing - especially now that they're wanting to phase out the PS2, is to reintegrate it into the PS3. That, at least, would restore the upgrade path. Better late than never.
While others call your remark trolling, I simply call it inaccurate.
Nintendo developed a portable console (the 3DS) that is weaker than telephones in processing power. If you of course compare for example an iPhone or high end Android device the mobile phone to compare against. I in the comparable price category, I'm quite confident that the 3DS holds up quite well.
As for the Wii vs. a telephone, then you're not taking time into context. Nintendo would obviously not release a TV console with lower specs than an iPad. Although I have to admit, for the market which Nintendo focuses on, I believe they'd have no problem at all selling a console based on the same specifications as the iPad 2.
It would not be hard at this point for Apple to sell a sup'd up version of the AppleTV based on the A5 (or a quad core version of it) with a faster graphics chip. If Apple would then add external controller support to the device or even make the iPhone, iPod or iPad a standard controller for the AppleTV, then Apple would immediately gain a very strong foothold into the console game market.
What most people keep forgetting is that Nintendo isn't about "hard core" gamers. Apple could very easily enter the console gaming market today and the best part (for them and maybe even the consumer) is that the consumer would already own tons of content.
The only real problem I see for Apple in this context is that they need to fix the 5 device limit for DRM. I've had considerable problems with this myself as in our house, we have an iPhone and two iPads. This makes managing licenses a nightmare for us as we need to be able to move media between devices. I will not buy a new copy of an audiobook so that my daughter can listen to it after my son who listens to it after my wife who listens to it after me.