Sony Announces the PS4

As many expected, Sony has officially announced the PS4 at the Sony PlayStation Meeting today. The new PlayStation will have an X86 processor, "state of the art" GPU, 8 GB of high-speed unified memory, and a hard drive for local storage. The PS4 will allow gamers to share their gameplay stream and even remotely take control of friend's games. Along with the PS4, Sony has unveiled a new DualShock 4 controller which features a built-in touchpad at the center of the controller, and a built-in microphone jack.

Comments

Re:"Uses an X86 Processor"

[gman003]

Benchmark-wise, an FX 8350, the 8-core top-end Piledriver, is considered comparable to the i5 3570. The i5 generally takes a large lead in single-threaded performance, but the FX leads on the more parallel stuff. Still effectively a tie, especially with the mere $10 price difference. People I know tend to go Intel, since it's cooler and (if you spring $30 for the 3570K version) it overclocks better, but for most purposes they can be considered equivalents.

However, the 8350 is clocked at 4.0GHz, precisely twice that the PS4 is rumored to have (the detailed specs were not shown tonight, but the stuff that was matches up exactly with what the leaked specs claimed so I'm treating them as reasonably accurate). So it is a reasonable conclusion that the PS4 chip would run approximately half as fast as the FX-8350. Yes, cache hit rates, memory controller clocks and all that will affect it, but at the end of the day, the processor has to run instructions, and if it does that at half the rate, it's running slower. (And yes, you can compare the PS4 and FX clock-for-clock, because they're the same architecture (at least as far as my information goes)).

I simply used i3/i5 as a reference, as they are both more generic names than FX-4300/FX-8350, and Intel has a larger market share and brand awareness, so their labels make for better shorthand.

Re:How long until the PS4 is irrelevant?

[vux984]

If I want to play the latest game for a PC, I have to check the specs, buy a new video card every year.

I'm still using a GTX260 from 2008. It still meets the Recommended specs for games like Skyrim. "Recommended", not "minimum"; and I can play with graphics settings on "high" without issue. Admittedly I ~am~ now starting to look at upgrading it in the near future, but its pushing 5 years now and I could probably squeeze another year or three out of it.

I'll have to upgrade the CPU and RAM every 2 years or so as well.

A core 2 quad (Q6600) from 2007 is still perfectly fine for pretty much everything on the market today.

A decent gaming rig will set me back $1500 and be a money sink.

None of that has been true for 5+ years. A decent gaming rig costs $600. For that you can get a very solid budget oriented system. And you won't have to upgrade it for several years.

At $1500 you are buying premium brand power supplies with modular interconnects, brand name RAM, deluxe motherboards, nice big solid state primary drives, and seriously flirting with the idea of SLI graphics.

Re:"Uses an X86 Processor"

[xhrit]

The official press release says the ps4's exact specs.

CPU : x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”, 8 cores
GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based
Memory : GDDR5 8GB
Optical Drive : BD 6xCAV


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