Sony Engineering Director Leads a PS4 Teardown

[roseofbattle]

Sony Engineering Director Leads a PS4 Teardown

There's one week left until the PS4 launches, and now we finally get to see the innards of the PS4.

It's a careful operation. Sony engineering Yasuhiro Ootori dons a pair of white gloves as he carefully dissects the PS4 for video posted by Wired [http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/ps4-gallery#slideid-86721]. He reveals the inside of the PS4 for the first time.

Four screws and two seals stand in the way of opening the next-generation console. Ootori mentions the seals are there to discourage people from dismantling the PS4, and judging by the broken seals, it will be obvious when the PS4 has been taken apart. With the lower part removed, you can see the fan and the optical disc drive. Next, Ootori removes the power supply unit. Next he removes the Bluetooth antenna, disc drive, and cover of the hard disk drive unit, which requires the unscrewing of only one screw. Ootori takes the PS4 apart further, revealing the motherboard. Ootori explains each part of the motherboard succinctly.

Sony decided to use an x86 chip similar to processors used in personal computers instead of the PS3's complex Cell microprocessor. The PS4's x86 chip should make the lives of developers easier when building games.

[gallery=1873]

"Things have gotten a little more standard, in layman's terms," Chris Zimmerman, co-founder and director of development of Sony-owned Sucker Punch Productions. The designer is working on next-gen title InFAMOUS: Second Son. "The Sony hardware, historically, has been very quirky. If you were willing to put the effort in to take advantage of those quirks, you could do some incredible things, but there was a lot of effort involved to just get to the point of getting everything running. That's less the case with this [console] generation."

Ootori lays the pieces out for display, and you can see the many pieces of the hardware that fit into the compact, black box of the PS4. I hope he had a great time putting it all back together.

Source: Wired (photos by Ariel Zambelich) [http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/ps4-gallery]

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[Dr.Awkward]

Is it just me, or does anyone else notice how...spacious the motherboard is?

 

[Daemascus]

Wow, that's a lot less parts than I expected... But hopefully than means less things that can go wrong.

 

[1337mokro]

"You can replace the HDD with a bigger one"

And instantly lose my warranty... I don't think you thought that one through entirely. Maybe have an access hatch for the HDD so we CAN swap them and don't have to break the seals that void the warranty.

 

[Vie]

Wait, a company is actually going out there and showing off the internals of their product?
And going into detail on how it's put together, and what each part actually dose within the system as a whole?

Damn, Sony's actually using their heads.

Plus I'm glad to see that the PS4 seems to be as easy, if not easier, to work on than the PS3. It makes fixing the dodgy first generation PS3's ribbon cable for the network card relatively easy.

 

[Vivi22]

Next, Ootori removes the power supply unit.

Internal power supplies in next gen consoles bother me. Let's take something built to be as small as possible making adequate air cooling difficult and stick the hottest part of it inside the case. Now granted, even when you don't have the power supply in the case, thing's can still be prone to overheating such as with the 360, or you can have them internal, produce a ton of heat, but be sturdy enough to take it like the PS3 usually was, but it just seems like a silly design choice to me.

Take them out, make the console smaller, cut down on the overall heat being produced inside the case, and make it much easier to cool so long as you haven't hired Microsoft engineers.

 

[Vivi22]

"You can replace the HDD with a bigger one"

And instantly lose my warranty... I don't think you thought that one through entirely. Maybe have an access hatch for the HDD so we CAN swap them and don't have to break the seals that void the warranty.

This video outright states that only two of the four seals are to tell if someone has opened it and voided the warranty. It looks to me like part of the top panel that covers the HDD can easily be removed without totally disassembling the console. You're not going to void your warranty by changing the HDD in this any more than you'd have voided the warranty in a PS3 if you did it.

 

[MCerberus]

Wait, a company is actually going out there and showing off the internals of their product?
And going into detail on how it's put together, and what each part actually dose within the system as a whole?

Damn, Sony's actually using their heads.

Plus I'm glad to see that the PS4 seems to be as easy, if not easier, to work on than the PS3. It makes fixing the dodgy first generation PS3's ribbon cable for the network card relatively easy.

Wait wait... how the hell do you screw up IDE cable?

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

Great, it doesn't look too hard to get at everything. I had a fun time try tearing apart my phat PS3 a year ago to fix the Blu-ray drive and a usb port. Trying to find all these little screws hidden all around is a pain. It would have been nice to have a HDD access cover though.
At least the PS4 power supply is in the back. The PS2 and PS3 ones, if I remember correctly, are sitting on top of the motherboard conducting heat to components underneath.

 

[Quiotu]

'The total is 8GB, and the bandwidth is 176 Gbps.'

Goddamn... I forgot how sexy the memory they used for it is.

"You can replace the HDD with a bigger one"

And instantly lose my warranty... I don't think you thought that one through entirely. Maybe have an access hatch for the HDD so we CAN swap them and don't have to break the seals that void the warranty.

This video outright states that only two of the four seals are to tell if someone has opened it and voided the warranty. It looks to me like part of the top panel that covers the HDD can easily be removed without totally disassembling the console. You're not going to void your warranty by changing the HDD in this any more than you'd have voided the warranty in a PS3 if you did it.

Yeah, there will be a video out soon that will let people know how to replace the drive. I can see replacing the HDD with an SSD creating a huge difference with this console. And yes, they're compatible.

 

[joeman098]

After taking apart a 360 and a ps3 It definitely seems like in my opinion that the ps3 was put together way better every thing is all snug and fitting and nice. The 360 was just a box with a metal box filled with things inside.

 

[Denamic]

Is it just me, or does anyone else notice how...spacious the motherboard is?

What about it? Motherboards don't need to be large, and with it being built to spec, it doesn't have a lot of the extras a PC motherboard has. What takes space is the actual components being plugged into it, as well as the space needed for the airflow.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

After taking apart a 360 and a ps3 It definitely seems like in my opinion that the ps3 was put together way better every thing is all snug and fitting and nice. The 360 was just a box with a metal box filled with things inside.

Yeah, the 360 had its GPU and tiny heat sink right under the DVD drive with plenty of space in front of and behind the CPU. They could have moved components around to get better cooling for both processors and held off or solved the RRoD.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"I hope he had a great time putting it all back together."

Lol, me too Carly!!

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

This actually makes me happy. I'm one of those guys who like to open up tech to see what's inside. I could not stand having a PS4 and not knowing what's inside it. I couldn't wait for my PS3 warranty to expire to open up that sucker. There were no satisfying screenshots online at the time.

 

[RicoADF]

Next, Ootori removes the power supply unit.

Internal power supplies in next gen consoles bother me. Let's take something built to be as small as possible making adequate air cooling difficult and stick the hottest part of it inside the case. Now granted, even when you don't have the power supply in the case, thing's can still be prone to overheating such as with the 360, or you can have them internal, produce a ton of heat, but be sturdy enough to take it like the PS3 usually was, but it just seems like a silly design choice to me.

Take them out, make the console smaller, cut down on the overall heat being produced inside the case, and make it much easier to cool so long as you haven't hired Microsoft engineers.

PS1, 2 and 3 all had internal power supplies without issue. Remember this isn't Microsoft quality

 

[iniudan]

"You can replace the HDD with a bigger one"

And instantly lose my warranty... I don't think you thought that one through entirely. Maybe have an access hatch for the HDD so we CAN swap them and don't have to break the seals that void the warranty.

You don't need to break the seal to change hard drive, it is under the top shiny plate plastic plate which you simply slide off and doesn't require to break the seal, he just started with the sealed part first.

 

[truckspond]

I can remember seeing videos of the PS3 being taken apart and the thing reminds me of a modern car engine. It's almost like they designed the PS3 to look good while being taken apart. The PS4 seems to continue that trend