Rumor: "Very Affordable" PS4 Based on AMD's A10 APU
- Thread starter Sarah LeBoeuf
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Like everyone else I am focused on the RAM. My problem however, is I do not like the concept of a console having two different RAM levels, or even the capacity for upgradable ram. Reminds me too much of things like the FX chip on n64. If the high end capacity for the spec is 16... All units need to be 16. And yes for next gen, 16 is an ideal amount.
Especially with this being SONY and the likelihood that they will eventually say, all 8gb ram sets are insufficient to use and you MUST upgrade to 16, and you have to use our proprietary RAM chips, and if you refuse to upgrade you will not be able to access any digital content until you do, and upgrading ram by any means other than authorized upgrade center is a breach of not only the warranty of the device but the Terms of service of your leased physical hardware. And any use you find on the leased equipment that does not meet with our corporate approval will result in forfeiture of rights and admission of guilt of theft of copywritten material
I mean this IS SONY we are talking about.
Especially with this being SONY and the likelihood that they will eventually say, all 8gb ram sets are insufficient to use and you MUST upgrade to 16, and you have to use our proprietary RAM chips, and if you refuse to upgrade you will not be able to access any digital content until you do, and upgrading ram by any means other than authorized upgrade center is a breach of not only the warranty of the device but the Terms of service of your leased physical hardware. And any use you find on the leased equipment that does not meet with our corporate approval will result in forfeiture of rights and admission of guilt of theft of copywritten material
I mean this IS SONY we are talking about.
I will admit, my memory is foggy. I recalled there were better, granted more expensive, video cards available. Don't recall either the PS3 nor 360 launching with top of the line GPU cores - maybe from same "tech linage" yes, R520 and GF7 series; but not top of the line, Sony and MS would go broke.Kumagawa Misogi said:
Either way, the rest of my post still holds.
Man, if game prices really do go up to $70-$80 per game, I almost definitely will be dropping out of the main part of the hobby. I'll wind up just sticking with a PC and the consoles I already have, playing old classics, new indie games, and F2P titles. I'm hoping "affordable at launch" means "will actually be affordable at some point before the hardware is completely obsolete," because I love Sony's consoles and their exclusives, and they really screwed the pooch this gen with the $600 launch price that was somehow still a loss leader for them. But if the game price goes up another $10, they'll have completely driven me out of the console market and into the PC and smart phone market, regardless of what the system itself costs.Beautiful End said:
I would think so too, but when looking at manufacturing costs and suggesting two different ram allocations, which seems more likely, making two different versions of the same hardware for each allocation, Or making one version with an empty RAM DIMM?deadish said:
EDIT: I reread the article... I might be misinterpreting the 8gb or 16gb Ram. I was taking it to mean there would be optional models, much as is popular in I-products whereas It is inappropriate in consoles.
Edit2: Although that could still be feasible, if the Ram Allocation was governed much in the way an operating system limits the max amount of Ram that can be used per program, you could simply set the limit for all games to meet the 8gb limit, and those with the additional 8gb could utilize that ram for other multitasked programs running in the background. Given the push for multitasking and again, the precedents set by Smartphones, that seems like a realistic possibility.
Will it be backwards compatible?, if not, then I'm not interested, I don't own a PS3, but if the PS4 is backwards compatible, I'll definitely get one, because by the time the PS4 get released, most of the PS3 games I wanted will be discounted, pretty much like what happened to PS2... and speaking of wich... PS2 games in PS4... please?
The thing about smart phones, assuming you're talking about Apple's tiered model, is that that's not system ram. It's storage memory. As far as I know, a given generation of Apple hardware is going to to have the same amount of ram, processor speed, and so on regardless of model, with the amount of storage memory being the only thing that changes. This is already analagous to how consoles have different models with different sized hard drives. The only real difference is that Apple's stuff has a fixed memory size. Most of their competitors' hardware has a micro-SD slot for expansion, which is one of the many reasons that I'm not a fan of Apple's stuff.viranimus said:
A name change is wise from a branding stand point if they're not going to support the previous consoles software. Knowing Sony, they won't; especially since their digital signatures and encryption have been broken.
16gb of RAM on an A10 would be a waist, especially in a limited task focused enviroment like a game console, now if they are going to allow 'Other OS' again then 16gb could be a real possibility, but again, Sony stopped 'Other OS' for a reason. Keep in mind the current console generation has been getting by on 512MB of RAM. I'd be surprised to see more than 4GB, my desktop under heaving gaming never goes over 6GB and 2GB of that is other crap running in the back ground.
*edit I forgot GPU RAM and General RAM or totaled for consoles, 6GB would still probably be overkill on a console.
Also, PC system performance on a set chip shouldn't be compared with a console performance. When your not having to deal with Direct X and have programmed and compiled for the hardware your running on specifically you can achieve very impressive results. PC's have to rely on raw horse power to make up for software overhead that doesn't exist in a console environment. Keeping that in mind what an A10 APU can do working with win7 it should be more than sufficient for next gen gaming.
The only problem I see is the same one Apple reportedly had when they were investigating using AMD in their original Air's, that being AMD lacked the supply chain to meet the demands that Apple estimated. AMD's ability to get millions of chips out hasn't really improved. Sony would have to stock up before release and then deal with high demand for months after release with AMD. Not that the Original PS3's release was expedient by any definition.
16gb of RAM on an A10 would be a waist, especially in a limited task focused enviroment like a game console, now if they are going to allow 'Other OS' again then 16gb could be a real possibility, but again, Sony stopped 'Other OS' for a reason. Keep in mind the current console generation has been getting by on 512MB of RAM. I'd be surprised to see more than 4GB, my desktop under heaving gaming never goes over 6GB and 2GB of that is other crap running in the back ground.
*edit I forgot GPU RAM and General RAM or totaled for consoles, 6GB would still probably be overkill on a console.
Also, PC system performance on a set chip shouldn't be compared with a console performance. When your not having to deal with Direct X and have programmed and compiled for the hardware your running on specifically you can achieve very impressive results. PC's have to rely on raw horse power to make up for software overhead that doesn't exist in a console environment. Keeping that in mind what an A10 APU can do working with win7 it should be more than sufficient for next gen gaming.
The only problem I see is the same one Apple reportedly had when they were investigating using AMD in their original Air's, that being AMD lacked the supply chain to meet the demands that Apple estimated. AMD's ability to get millions of chips out hasn't really improved. Sony would have to stock up before release and then deal with high demand for months after release with AMD. Not that the Original PS3's release was expedient by any definition.
There was too much stuff in it. Remember the plan was for the Cell to do *everything* pulling double duty as CPU and GPU but that didn't work out, so they slapped a (what was it, like a half-generation??) Geforce in there to handle graphics, then there was the Emotion Engine for PS2 compatibility, and lets not forget the BD-ROM drive (which was horribly expensive at the time).Fappy said:
16GB seems really unlikely though. It'll be 4-8GB of fastish regular DDR3 ('cus it's cheap), and more likely 4 than 6 or 8.
Yeah, I confess I ended up doing a complete end around within the course of one post. And yes, I was referring to apples storage capacity as analogy for Ram capacity suggestion here. Hence why I suggested one base model with empty slots for core usage, And allow that to represent two models, Core, and multi tasking models. More I think on it, the more it makes sense to me.Owyn_Merrilin said:
It won't happen. It will split the install base, bad idea as one of the strengths of a console is that the hardware is uniform across the board - excluding things like secondary storage that doesn't really impact the way a program is written (unless it uses a crazy amount of secondary storage when executing).viranimus said:
When they say, 8-16GB, it probably just means they haven't decide on which to standardise on.
Keep in mind that the R520 architecture used in the 360 was replaced in the Radeon HD 2000 series, and PC's can't play Skyrim at console resolution with less than a Radeon HD 4890 (R700) (skyrim's minimum PC specs called for a 3600 series), the A10 APU's use AMD HD 6000 series GPUs.deadish said:
Compare the Radean HD 2000 series against the 6000 series, that's the performance difference we should expect with the A10 in a console over a PC.
Edit* Got shown this years [a href="http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/processors/a-series/Pages/a-series-model-number-comparison.aspx"]A10 APU's[/a] they are now using HD 7000 series graphics
It's a completely different architecture. Very unlikely that it could run PS3 games, and PS2 only through software emulation like PCSX2 (so possible).SupahGamuh said:
They could just graft a Cell on the side of the launch machines to allow them to run PS3 stuff, then remove it later on. Like they did with the PS3s and PS2 back compat. However, the PS3 GPU is Nvidia, but this is ATI GPU. You'd have to hide that from games that are trying to bang on the hardware directly, which seems tough. So you'd also have to include the PS3 GPU. As focused as they are on cost, this seems really unlikely.
If the PS4 or Orbis or whatever they decide to name it, doesn't have backwards compatibility, then when they do release the next version of the PlayStation network, they will need an extensive library of PS3 games at VERY cheap prices to compensate. Including a wider selection of PS2 and 1 games.
I think it was TB that said a consoles early life not only depends on it's launch titles, but what else can be played on it. Because the former will be likely a very limited selection.
I think it was TB that said a consoles early life not only depends on it's launch titles, but what else can be played on it. Because the former will be likely a very limited selection.