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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.
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.
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?
Wow what a clueless moron
I'm still finding new ways to die in Nethack!
--
BMO
you might be forgetting the part where the 360 not using the cell at all.
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
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 PPC of the 360 and near identical to the primary processing unit of the cell.
All written up in this book here, from one of the engineers of the cell processor at ibm: http://www.amazon.com/Race-New-Game-Machine-Playstation/dp/0806531010
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
Except it is. And the OP exactly right.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123069467545545011.html
brandelf -t FreeBSD
I am no fan of Microsoft Corporation, but you sir, are a troll
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
...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."
Sony has done the same thing with the PS3. There have been about a dozen different hardware revisions since the original two release units, with multiple die shrinks on the silicon. Production costs are probably under $200, and power consumption is about a third what it originally was.
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.
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
you might be forgetting the part where the 360 not using the cell at all.
Both processors for the PS3 and the XBox360 are stripped down and modified versions of the IBM 970 PowerPC. The PS3 uses one CPU (two threads) while the XBox 360 uses three CPU's (6 threads), however the PS3 also has eight SPEs on the chip, but only seven of them handle processing. So effectively the XBox 360 actually does use a very similar CPU as the PS3 but it does not use SPE's.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
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.
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.
The Cell SPE went on to also become the 360's CPU, but there are no Cell PPEs (the thing that actually makes them Cell processors) in the 360.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sigh. It's a generic PPC processor, it doesn't matter if Sony likes to call it something else and considers it a part of the Cell; it isn't. Go away troll.
No, the real heathens are the ones who use Falcon's Eye.
Isotropic rendering in my Nethack? No way, man...
--
BMO
Does anyone really care? Who is eagerly anticipating PS4? Who even cares about consoles anymore... ?
They ripped it off, it's well known. Apparently not by everyone though.
The problem with common knowledge is that it does not prove that something is correct. If a fact is "well known" then you should probably spend a bit more time checking to ensure that this is true.
The idea that the XBox 360 ripped off the Cell comes from the cover notes for David Shippy's book. However, in this interview with him, the details don't seem to match the blurb. Regarding Microsoft choosing IBM to design their chip::
Shippy doesn't believe that Microsoft yet knew that Sony had the PlayStation 3 in the works -- but liked what it saw in the PowerPC technology that was now possible thanks to design principles partly researched for Cell.
The article says that all the companies involved had the right to use the technology developed for the Cell for other projects and other customers. This is standard practice. The article goes on:
Does that mean Microsoft got a look at the Cell itself? "No, we didn't show them the Cell chip," Shippy clarifies. "The Cell itself and the fundamental architecture that went into that, actually not -- that was all proprietary for PS3. What was shown to Microsoft was just a technology road map that said, 'hey, we can go do these high-performance PowerPC cores at very high frequency and low power'."
In wanting to sell his book, the author made it seem that there was something underhanded going on with Microsoft. And yet:
So despite some higher-level conceptual ideas in common, Shippy stresses that both consoles' processors are very different, from architecture to software models. "They differentiated themselves in their own unique ways," says Shippy. "What's interesting is that they did that with this common building block that was designed initially for the PS3."
The Xenon processor was not a ripoff of the Cell, IBM just used some of the technology that they developed with the other processor.
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.
A "Classic" XBox was no more than a PC with a PIII Celeron 733 processor and a NVidia GeForce 3 GPU, running a modified Windows 2000 kernel. However, the 360 is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, being based on a triple-core (6 thread) PowerPC architecture, with ATi graphics and Hardware Hypervisor systems. The 360 truly was cutting edge at the time, more so even than the PS3.
The PS3 came out later, used a single core PowerPC base, but added 3 specialist FPUs (SPUs) (The "Cell Architecture" they so touted), with NVidia graphics (Around GeForce 6800 level) but gave the CPU->GPU link tiny bandwidth, and no bandwidth at all from GPU to system RAM, essentially gimping the system, as the SPUs have to be used to do any serious work, because offloading to the GPU is so painfully slow.
The Wii was a beefed-up Gamecube, which itself was a highly clocked single-core, single-thread PowerPC, single-thread ARM9 co-processor (With native Java capability) and ATi graphics.
And what of MS Kinect, which broke new ground in interaction? As for mobile OS, what bout Zune (The predecessor to Windows Phone 7, which is ground-breaking in it's own right)? And, of course, MS Office, which (love it or hate it) has become the de-facto standard in office software.
I should really quit replying to this article, my karma is going to hell. People are misunderstanding me. I'm not talking about if they're all just PPC ripoffs, or if Microsoft "stole" their design (clearly they did not). My point in my original post was simply that Microsoft benefited by waiting to see what Sony did by using a chip provided by IBM that was largely funded by Sony, and that going second is a lot cheaper to 1up when it comes to hardware wars.
"The Xenon processor was not a ripoff of the Cell, IBM just used some of the technology that they developed with the other processor."
That's exactly the point, the technology was developed by IBM at the behest of Sony for the PS3. It was a joint effort but largely funded by Sony, which is why they're so leery on doing so again, exactly for the reasons you made.
"The article says that all the companies involved had the right to use the technology developed for the Cell for other projects and other customers. This is standard practice."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(microprocessor)#Xenon_in_Xbox_360
No matter if it was malicious - Microsoft benefited in their consoles from technology funded by Sony. Sony has realized their mistake.
A little frustrating that I got marked as a troll, and I appreciate your response. This is all to do with business, little to do with the actual technology.
You forgot the comma after "says", genius.
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
Xbox uses a simple general-purpose PowerPC CPU. Yes, it's the same unit that's part of the Cell, but it's also the most boring part of it, and lacks everything that makes Cell special.
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...
Hardly, that. The Xenon is quite an impressive CPU/arch. That CPU coupled with the VMX-128 clearly outperforms the PS3 in the graphics arena despite the oceans of koolaid Sony served to the world on the subject. PS3 does quite well at Folding@Home, but I bought it so I could play games at 1080, not 720.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
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!
As I said earlier. The problem isn't exotic hardware or whiz-bang factors. The largest problem for all consoles is a great tool chain and development environment. You screw that up and it makes developers lives hell to have to build the tool chain all by themselves.
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 ^_^
My point is that Xbox has a fairly conventional CPU/GPU combo, it just happens to use the same (or rather very similar) CPU as is used for general-purpose processing in Cell. It does lack all the extra specialized units which made Cell non-conventional. I do not intend to argue that Cell approach is better (in my personal opinion, experience has shown it to be otherwise, at least for games), only that it's non-mainstream.
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.
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.
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.
We're talking about the PS4, not the Xbox 360.
...would go into securing the PSN network.
1) SPUs are not FPUs. They're full-fledged CPUs with limited local memory.
2) The PPE is double-threaded.
3) The PS3 has bluetooth connectivity.
4) The PS3 has wifi connectivity.
5) The PS3 has a built-in hard disk.
6) The PS3 has a blu-ray drive.
7) The PS3 has a web browser.
8) The PS3 can use off-the-shelf accessories.
9) The PS3 controllers recharge themselves while you use them.
10) The PS3 has a built-in power supply, and is still slimmer and more quiet than the matching Xbox 360 models.
11) The PS3 can play back most kinds of media without requiring PSN access or special-purpose storage devices.
12) The PS3 doesn't have the Xbox 360 reliability problems.
Kinect is definitely cooler than the Move, but having no buttons, it's more useful for "social" games than traditional ones.
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.
x86 is too expensive for consoles. That's why Microsoft scrapped it in favor of PPC.
Mada mada dane.
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.
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.