Sony has been historically through the decades, pushing technology to its limits, and in turn leveraging the PlayStation brand to help its’ own technologically superior formats succeed. This is one of the reason why the PlayStation brand consistently draws in the tech enthusiasts, the early adopters, and gets retailers like Best Buy to bundle their consoles with their newest televisions. If Sony had the PlayStation brand to leverage back when they were launching the BetaMax, that format war would have gone in a different direction as well.
People take away the bad lesson from the PS2 and PS3. The mistakes Sony made with both systems was to put their money worth in developing a brand new processor mostly on their own (the Emotion Engine in the PS2 and the Cell in the PS3) rather than simply turn out to ATI or NVIDIA well ahead of time and collaborate with them to offer the best possible processor they can provide. Both the EE and the Cell were outrageously expensive to develop, a nightmare to program for, and I’m sure we do think that the PS2 and PS3 would have been just as successful without them. Without the Cell, the PS3 could have probably launched with a price tag of around $499 for the premium model and come roaring out of the gate.
Blu Ray by itself was an asset for Sony. HDMI was too, the same for Sony. The single investment that they poured into and didn’t pay off for them was the Cell. Yet the PS3, contrary of all the criticism, the obscene launch price, and giving Microsoft’s Xbox 360 a full year head start, is still toe to toe with the 360 in terms of their sales and is beloved by most gamers in the community. There is no need to throw out Sony’s process. All Sony needs to do is optimize the costs to launch their console under a price tag of $499 for the premium model and $399 for the barebones model.
Project Denver would also be monstrous enough to decode HVDs at 4k resolution a.k.a film resolution video, which would suit for PS4. It makes a too much of sense for movie studios to use these HVDs to distribute their films to movie theater than the current hugely expensive spindles they use now. The more movie theaters that use these discs, the more the costs are slashed down and the more viable it becomes for the audience who eventually will become the consumers. Initially, people with projectors in their basements will need those too. Soon after, people with 4k resolution TVs (which will be quite common since that is the easiest way to do glassless 3D at 1080p) will also pen that down on their shopping list.
They could easily bundle the PS4 with a DualMove + Eye HD – A Dual Shock that splits in half into two Move controllers with a projected release date in 2014, $399 for the basic SKU, $499 for the premium model, all without losing any money on each console sold like what they did for the PlayStation 3.
Daver Jaffe
Aug 10. 2011
The only truth about this desperate article is sony hives can dream about it, only.
ganja
Aug 10. 2011
Who needs PS4 or Xbox 720 ???
Smartphones and pads/tablets are replacing consoles next generation….FACT. Deal with it!
Your Ignorant
Aug 10. 2011
HAHAHAA! Yeah, and in 2 years they will replace supercomputers. Lol ignorance is bliss.
ganja
Aug 10. 2011
iOS and Cloud gaming will take the world, so goodbye consoles…it’s soooo last gen!
Blackberries already crushed by Androids and iOS altogether.
console_games_ain't_dead
Aug 10. 2011
i really hope that the PS$ will be equipped with an other version of the cell processor (4PPE+32SPE) which a teraflopic CPU that will help us to introduce ray-tracing in next gen console and preserve compatibility with PS3 games
Anon
Aug 10. 2011
Ganja, regarding the retarded theme of your comments, your name says it all far more than your words ever could!
PS4 should be
Aug 12. 2011
The ps4 should have the same cell structure but modified, the cell is still very competitive to high end CPUs today 7 years after its creation, that is just amazing. They should have 4 PPE (that can perform two operation at a time) and 28 to 32 SPEs. With that many SPEs you could have a game run without a graphic card (not an impressibe game obviously). They should have an 8 core gpu, vita has four so. 8 gb memory, and 1 gb emRAM. And use the HVD format which blows BLU-RAY out of the water as of now
console_games_ain't_dead
Aug 12. 2011
any other CPU instead of the Cell Processor will be a wrong choice, because sony can’t no longer do the same mistake once again and spend a lot of money developping an other CPU,
and also devellopers nowadays are used to the idea to program using the cell architecture, so there must be no problem or any delay due to new architecture after the PS4 get released
plus i suggest adding an other set of Instruction-set to enhance performance and increase the GHZ numbers (the cell CPU already hit 6 GHZ in the past) but due to power consumption i don’t think it will rich that high but to ensure that the PS4 will be powerful for a decade it must also think about getting an XDDRAM2 which is more powerful than the GDDR5 nowadays (they must not forget about competition that is coming:
-intel haswell which will feature a vector co-processor plus a whole new instruction-set plus directx 11.1
-AMD’s bulldozer which feature FMA4 XOP AVX and so on
-ATI southern islands
console_games_ain't_dead
Aug 12. 2011
…..
-nvidia echelon which will be based on project denver (this one will be a 10Teraflops video card but it still far away probably 2018).
and of course i think all that power will be enough to provide us with games at atleast (WQXGA 2560*1600 resolution), 3D and raytraced rendering based games are also welcomed but i would like to have a glass free 3D experience (as far as i’m concerned i’m a one-eyed born person) so 3D based glasses are not going to help
will all that amount of data to deal with i don’t think that bluray disk and even the 100GB version will be enough, i highly recommend passing to the next level (HVD) because that is a tradition for sony when it comes to launch new storage media
PS1=CD
PS2=DVD
PS3=BLURAY
PS4=hopefully HVD
ah and before i forget i really hope that sony will rethink about letting people instal linux to take full advantage of the Cell architecture for many purpose such as (video transcoding and so on) because preventing people from using other OS options in the ps3 ain’t a clever decision at all
console_games_ain't_dead
Aug 12. 2011
….and i highly doubt that sony will choose the project denver because it will just add an other layer of complexity to the programming process, put in mind that the maxwell architecture is just an other scalar + vector coprocessor CPUs (scalar = ARM based processor which is probably going to be 8 cores clocked at 2.5 GHZ, vector coprocessor = cuda Cores which are probably going to be 1024 Cores) just like the cell processor (scalar cpu = 1PPE, vector co processors = 8SPE), i really recommend sony to go for ATI cards because it will help reduce the prices also because Nvidia’s ones are highly priced and ATI’s ones are chip and offer more raw performance, but i think if ask for SSD drive it will just make the ps4 cost more than 700 dollar so it’s up to you
Abram730
Jan 03. 2012
@console_games_ain’t_dead
“any other CPU instead of the Cell Processor will be a wrong choice”
IBM’s Next Cell Processor is Dead in the Water. It isn’t a choice, so let it go.
The CELL is like GPGPU.. NVIDIA wasn’t finished with theirs in time for the PS3.
CUDA has good adoption and resources for developers.
NVIDA not only has the HW, they have the software too.
Here look at the cloth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY_kTMFpQ4E
hair and cloth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKzNoEuXJEM
hair
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOlQ_YeR6Gc
real time demo with APEX cloth
GPGPU is better because it can be used for graphics if processing isn’t required. It also gives you the option to upgrade the CPU simply by selling a graphics addon in say 2019-2020. You could then use all of the CUDA cores for cpu if you wanted or render some frames.. NO WASTED POWER.
Look at CPU $ per gigaflop vs gpu.
It’s project Denver for a phone up to server in one code language or IBM power cores rather then ARM cores…
Having it sold in 2 parts lowers costs.. 2 teraflops in 2014-2015 then 8 more in 2019-2020. Then sell a slim with 10 teraflops on one chip and bring the costs down.
It’s mostly a CPU question. ARM or IBM power core.
AMD’s 7000 series is looking good on paper. They are finally getting their s**t together.
APU’s are really the way to go, but they need to be able to function as processors too. AMD’s APU’s have been just integrated graphics. I think they finally get it. But code and support wise NVIDIA is way ahead.
The ARM argument comes with 9 out of 10 chips being produced, are ARM. ARM could replace x86 as more people have devices that use ARM. It’s happened before.
It really is a question though.. I think cost wise selling the ps4 with an idiot proof slotted pcie 3.0 connection will give you a console with some life at an affordable price.
Also I think you are looking at 768 cores with powercore 1024 with denver.. Firm decisions need to be made by early 2013 at the latest. I think NVIDIA will show a 2 chip maxwell on kepler 756 + 256 early Denver.. duck tape and wood screws included.
Powercore is known.. Denver is a question.
HVD? blueray holds 50gb.. It should be enough. How many games use that? There can be more then one disk also.
What you need is more memory.. not SSD… I’D recommend an external HD and network storage to keep down costs. How much people can spend at one time is more of a limiter then how much they can spend over time.
4GB memory as an absolute minimum, better to have at least 6gb.
a fast 500gb per plater hard drive can be up in the low SSD range for sustained reads.. just limit how many random reads and it’s fine.. without a bloated OS.. it will be plenty fast.
I rarely get to read load screens myself.. They could do a hybrid drive with a very small SSD for the OS.
Abram730
Jan 03. 2012
oops
real time demo with APEX cloth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgS67BwPfFY