Rumor: "Very Affordable" PS4 Based on AMD's A10 APU

[Treblaine]

I wonder how they plan to make it "very affordable". There's a reason the PS3 was so expensive at launch...

By having really low standards, not even coming close to matching what typical users are capable with PC hardware today.

Also having everything-on-one-chip hugely reduces production costs as well as potential efficiency.

But this is a double win for PC as the A10 architecture is (unlike the Cell Broadband processor) very similar to PC hardware, games made for this new Playstation would be easily ported to and scaled up on PC.

I hope this A10 based system is true, it'll be affordable system for me to get a new generation of console games yet my current PC won't be rendered obsolete.

 

[Cyrus Hanley]

I have a hard time believing anything created by Sony is "very affordable".
It might be like the Vita, where the system price seems reasonable, but you need to pay extra for essentials.

Orbis basic system for $399.99.
Includes 256 GB hard drive and 1 month free Playstation Plus subscription.
Backwards compatibility available only in $499.99 models. Controller sold separately.
Price for controller: $99.99
Price for games at launch: $80.00

That actually seems rather reasonable.

 

[Treblaine]

And welcome to America, where the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and even "real" jobs don't pay as much as equivalent jobs in Australia.

Yet the average American wage is about 15-20% higher than the Aussie average wage, and that's calculated in 'international dollars' which are based on the purchasing power of the US dollar.

Average isn't necessarily median.

For example how is that "average" skewed by how there are so many multi-billionaires and even trillionaires living and earning in the United States while the "typical earner" may not earn much more or even less than other countries. This wealth doesn't trickle down, the super rich buy giant yachts, private planes. They don't buy games consoles, they buy private jets.

I don't have a source (yet) but I did hear in a BBC documentary about economics that in the United States middle earnings have frozen for the past 30 years while the highest earners have shot up "INSANELY high". Like an order of magnitude higher. Like is a banker earned $1 million in the 1980's, he'd take in $10 million today. This is happening almost everywhere in the world though some countries to a greater extent.

This can be insidious, as "average earnings" going up may appear like an egalitarian improvements, when most are being left behind as a tiny minority take in all the extra wealth being generated.

What you really need is to compare middle earners, with cost of living of middle earners (distance to commute, cost of commute, heating/air-conditioning expenses) and then the balance of both taxation and government support. So how much government tightens household budget and also how much it might (if at all) ease it.

But that's complicated as hell, really you could just, well, ASK australians and americans and Brits and so on what they feel they can afford. Can they afford X-amount per game? Can they afford a console with initial price of X-dollars-US/OZ. Because that's what it ultimately boils down to.

 

[Treblaine]

I have a hard time believing anything created by Sony is "very affordable".
It might be like the Vita, where the system price seems reasonable, but you need to pay extra for essentials.
...

Price for games at launch: $80.00

WHOOA WHOA WOW!!

Hold the phone, EIGHTY SMACKEROONS!

PC games are right now selling for the low low price of FREE (to play), I can barely afford console games at the equivalent of $60 (£40). My PS3 controller is collecting dust not because I can't find games worth playing but because I cannot justify the cost of each game. $80 would end up being £55 in the UK, that's a total turn off. I could buy almost every game I could ever want in a typical steam sale for that amount.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

I have a hard time believing anything created by Sony is "very affordable".
It might be like the Vita, where the system price seems reasonable, but you need to pay extra for essentials.
...

Price for games at launch: $80.00

WHOOA WHOA WOW!!

Hold the phone, EIGHTY SMACKEROONS!

PC games are right now selling for the low low price of FREE (to play), I can barely afford console games at the equivalent of $60 (£40). My PS3 controller is collecting dust not because I can't find games worth playing but because I cannot justify the cost of each game. $80 would end up being £55 in the UK, that's a total turn off. I could buy almost every game I could ever want in a typical steam sale for that amount.

As I remember, PS games were around $30 at launch (admitting my memory is fuzzy on this one),
PS2 games were between $40-$50 at launch.
PS3 games are pretty set at $60 at launch with the "special" editions being $70+

It makes sense that the cost of the games will go up. $80 might be an exaggeration,
it will probably be more like $70 with the price dropping dramatically within a year, but make no mistake, the price will go up, and developers will say that the price of games is too high, but won't actually do anything about it, because of course their games are the only ones that justify the insane price tag.

 

[deadish]

Yeah but it's a mid-range GPU, and even then it's the lower powered D series version more akin to the M series versions made for laptops than the 'standard' versions made for discrete GPU cards.

Might be fixable by just upping the number of GPU cores at the expense of CPU cores.

Either way, I believe cost will be the overriding concern not power. Sony has seen what happened with the PS3 and PSV. Not to mention that the global economy is currently in the toilet.

I dunno... you might be underestimating the effects things such as switching CPU architecture and the inherent problems of APUs (they're bastards for heat management) will have on the traditional resource efficiency of consoles, not to mention fundamental shift in design theory from 'gaming machine' to 'home entertainment and social media centre (oh yeah, they still play games, I guess, if that's your thing)' that we've seen happening.

I think you are worrying too much - we don't even know if the rumours are true.

 

[Alatar The Red]

Not sure if it has already been posted but just so you guys know, if these specs are real then the final console wont have 16GB of RAM.

These leaks are based on dev kits of the consoles and dev kits almost always come with double the memory for debugging purposes.

 

[Treblaine]

Everything sounds good except the RAM. Isn't 16GB a bit of an overkill?

Not if it allows the majority of a game to be cached for instant loading. Good idea if you ask me. Windows Vista onward use large amounts of RAM effectively by caching things that are expected to be loaded soon. RAM will also be shared with the GPU portion of the APU.

OT: The AMD A10 would make a very capable console part. It is a good inexpensive mid range CPU with a decent mid range integrated GPU. With the highly optimised OS and software consoles use it will be very powerful.

Going by the hard drive size it is obvious that it is in fact an SSD. This thing is going power on and load almost instantly.

My only disappointment is there is no mention of DisplayPort which is better than HDMI in terms of tech specs and the fact it is royalty free. Although seeing as Sony is one of the founders of HDMI I am not surprised.

Maybe it's a matter of coding, but after assembling so many gaming PCs and benchmarking them I've yet to find a game that gets a consistent advantage from 16GB of System RAM, even the highest speed. Even though it makes us more money we argue against customers requesting 16GB of RAM for a gaming rig as we know we'd be taking advantage of them.

16GB only really comes into it's own for processes that don't need to be fast but deal with a lot, like photoshop, video editing and making 3D models and animations. So basically game development.

8GB is just about ideal for even the most demanding games.

I think a likely scenario is the console plan to launch with 8GB, but the dev-kit models have double the RAM (16GB) just to make it easier to tweak, create and combine elements with the goal on the dev-kit to get the system memory usage down to only 8GB which will be the launch version.

Though it may be even half that, 4GB of RAM would be very affordable yet very capable on a console with refined specs and no Operating-System overhead. Xbox 360 has done so well on only 512MB of RAM shared between CPU and GPU. 4GB would be 8 times that, that is three Moore's Law doubling, what you'd expect over 6 years. 2013 is 6 years since PS3 launched in Europe.

 

[Treblaine]

I have a hard time believing anything created by Sony is "very affordable".
It might be like the Vita, where the system price seems reasonable, but you need to pay extra for essentials.
...

Price for games at launch: $80.00

WHOOA WHOA WOW!!

Hold the phone, EIGHTY SMACKEROONS!

PC games are right now selling for the low low price of FREE (to play), I can barely afford console games at the equivalent of $60 (£40). My PS3 controller is collecting dust not because I can't find games worth playing but because I cannot justify the cost of each game. $80 would end up being £55 in the UK, that's a total turn off. I could buy almost every game I could ever want in a typical steam sale for that amount.

As I remember, PS games were around $30 at launch (admitting my memory is fuzzy on this one),
PS2 games were between $40-$50 at launch.
PS3 games are pretty set at $60 at launch with the "special" editions being $70+

It makes sense that the cost of the games will go up. $80 might be an exaggeration,
it will probably be more like $70 with the price dropping dramatically within a year, but make no mistake, the price will go up, and developers will say that the price of games is too high, but won't actually do anything about it, because of course their games are the only ones that justify the insane price tag.

Look, games don't HAVE to endlessly go up in price because we are not in fact all earning more money with lower essential expenditures (rent, mortgages, car-payments, fuel for heating+transport, food, etc)

Our pockets are not bottomless.

An INEVITABLE RESULT of higher game price is people buy less games. The risk of each game becomes SO HIGH that developers NEVER want to take any risks, they just copy the last game with incremental improvements and people only invest in sure-bets that they know their friends will play so they aren't at risk of spending their entire disposable income of a month on a game that none of their friends play.

LOOK AT PC GAMING!

game price goes down = sales go up = revenue goes up.

Each copy is CHEAP to make, it's just an optical disc that can be mass produced for less than $1 per boxed copy.

If this generation is made on the foundation ofr games being any price higher than $80 then it is on the road to disaster.

If we make it clear NOW that we will not accept $80 then we will ALL be better off.

The question is, will the rich-boys screw it for everyone buying at $80 and throwing away their money they hold no value of and leaving everyone else high as dry. Will console gaming become an elite hobby that average earners will pay through the nose just to experience a small part of?

 

[Treblaine]

if their smart they will offer a 'premium' edition that supports full backwards comparability..... for a price

It might defeat the purpose if the premium is too high a price.

For example, if the Premium version costs more than a "core" PS4 PLUS the price you'd get from selling your PS3... then it makes more sense jsut to keep your PS3 and get core PS4.

Backwards compatibility made sense with PS1 to PS2. I sold my PS1 then used the money I made from that to help pay for PS2 yet I could still play all my PS1 games. Gamecube didn't have backwards compatibility but it sold for $99 when PS2 sold for $299.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

If this generation is made on the foundation ofr games being any price higher than $80 then it is on the road to disaster.

If we make it clear NOW that we will not accept $80 then we will ALL be better off.

The question is, will the rich-boys screw it for everyone buying at $80 and throwing away their money they hold no value of and leaving everyone else high as dry. Will console gaming become an elite hobby that average earners will pay through the nose just to experience a small part of?

Personally I already don't purchase games at launch because of the price tag. Why should I when the game's price will inevitably drop less than a year worth of waiting? Sometimes we even get GOTY editions that have all the DLC packaged in. It makes no sense to buy a game at launch unless it's a game that I just really REALLY wanted.

From just general chat on this site, quite a few people also do this, yet we have not seen any drop in price. So why do developers keep charging $60 for their games and then complain when people people buy used? Are there really that many rich kids willing to throw down money at launch or is it something else? I really don't know.

 

[Treblaine]

If this generation is made on the foundation ofr games being any price higher than $80 then it is on the road to disaster.

If we make it clear NOW that we will not accept $80 then we will ALL be better off.

The question is, will the rich-boys screw it for everyone buying at $80 and throwing away their money they hold no value of and leaving everyone else high as dry. Will console gaming become an elite hobby that average earners will pay through the nose just to experience a small part of?

Personally I already don't purchase games at launch because of the price tag. Why should I when the game's price will inevitably drop less than a year worth of waiting? Sometimes we even get GOTY editions that have all the DLC packaged in. It makes no sense to buy a game at launch unless it's a game that I just really REALLY wanted.

From just general chat on this site, quite a few people also do this, yet we have not seen any drop in price. So why do developers keep charging $60 for their games and then complain when people people buy used? Are there really that many rich kids willing to throw down money at launch or is it something else? I really don't know.

That's not a workable model. By waiting you are screwing the developers who get paid based on sales per quarter, and the retailer usually buys games for a price then lowering it later pretty much fire-sale prices to cut their losses making no profit or a loss even. And the dependence on pre-owned market is a further problem, it's sharing one actual sale the developers make money from amongst many.

People SHOULD buy games when they want to play them, but they can't for the price. the PS1 era was such a boom time because $30 was a cheap price yet earnings were high and cost of living was low. Now games cost twice as much, gas costs 4x as much (cuts into disposable income) and median incomes have pretty much frozen.

The problem is the publishers are in a trap of their own making, they drove up the price by being greedy, but drove down new sales.

Instead of selling each game for $60 where it will be resold to 3-4 different people, they could sell the game for $30 to each of those 4 people ONCE.

 

[newwiseman]

Regardless, my point was about how the A10 APU is using GPU tech 6 generations newer than what is in the 360.

Yeah but it's a mid-range GPU, and even then it's the lower powered D series version more akin to the M series versions made for laptops than the 'standard' versions made for discrete GPU cards.

Any fear that the A10 APU will be underpowered is misplaced

I dunno... you might be underestimating the effects things such as switching CPU architecture and the inherent problems of APUs (they're bastards for heat management) will have on the traditional resource efficiency of consoles, not to mention fundamental shift in design theory from 'gaming machine' to 'home entertainment and social media centre (oh yeah, they still play games, I guess, if that's your thing)' that we've seen happening.

That every thing else requires very little power, facebook, twitter, light internet browsing. Hulu and Netflix streaming are probably the most intense task in the everything else category and a Raspberry Pi can do that, err well as soon as they sort out the audio issues with the Android 4.0 release.

For game designers they will want all that to stop while playing most games regardless of what the system can handle. Probably savestate everything running to drive cache when you launch a game, and then have system integrated tasks available from the system menu in game. Last thing someone playing the next Battlefield or COD will want is a notification poping up, and the last thing the game devs will want to think about is how many apps are currently running when they launch this.

True the APU's don't have the most high end components but to be better than current gen that isn't necessary. Without discrete graphics AMD's APUs dominate on [a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/255838/amds_trinity_processors_vs_intels_ivy_bridge.html"]GPU tasks[/a], and anything done in a console would be integrated. Plus they don't want these thing to retail at $500 while still talking a loss, they'll want to come in around and hopefully below $350 for base models. Plus Sony isn't going to use some off the shelf A10, they'll get something custom.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

And welcome to America, where the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and even "real" jobs don't pay as much as equivalent jobs in Australia.

Yet the average American wage is about 15-20% higher than the Aussie average wage, and that's calculated in 'international dollars' which are based on the purchasing power of the US dollar.

Have you got a source on that? Because I've always understood Australians made more in general. They have to, because the cost of living over there is through the roof compared to what it is in the US. Video games are hardly the only thing that you guys get charged more for.

When we're talking about game prices.
In Norway a ps3 game costs the double of what it costs in the US and 1/3 more than in costs in Australia.

 

[newwiseman]

Well that's depressing; PC gamers have been waiting for years for the console designers to get off their arses and bring an offering that will finally move game developers on from graphics that have to run on 5+ year old hardware, and now we find out that the PS4/Orbis/Whatever is going to be running on an AMD A10, a CPU with a 3.8GHz base clock based on the horrible Piledriver architecture?

My "budget" gaming rig from two years ago with an overclocked Phenom II quad-core CPU can happily keep up with Piledriver rigs built today, and they get chewed to pieces by even the midrange of Intel's designs. And that's assuming they use the A10-5800K as the basis for the Orbis; there's the 3.4GHz 5700K model to think about as well.

You can put as much RAM in the thing as you like, if it's running what amounts to a last-gen midrange CPU and GPU it's still going to be rubbish.

Your probably still disheartened by the performance of the bulldozer architecture. I know I am, I'm still using a Phenom II x4 Black that I bought 5 years ago in my gaming system. The improvements that were made for piledrive place it well in the lead of [a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328.html"]AMD's previous chips[/a], though not by much; and fix most of what was wrong with the bulldozer's, especially the price.

Regardless the biggest problem with the bulldozer architecture in the first place was it's almost one sided focus on multithreading, in a time when most applications still don't take full advantage of 2 cores let alone 4-8. It also didn't have the through put to maximize all it's cores. With devs writing directly for the chip piledriver should perform great.

 

[SpAc3man]

Maybe it's a matter of coding, but after assembling so many gaming PCs and benchmarking them I've yet to find a game that gets a consistent advantage from 16GB of System RAM, even the highest speed. Even though it makes us more money we argue against customers requesting 16GB of RAM for a gaming rig as we know we'd be taking advantage of them.

16GB only really comes into it's own for processes that don't need to be fast but deal with a lot, like photoshop, video editing and making 3D models and animations. So basically game development.

8GB is just about ideal for even the most demanding games.

I think a likely scenario is the console plan to launch with 8GB, but the dev-kit models have double the RAM (16GB) just to make it easier to tweak, create and combine elements with the goal on the dev-kit to get the system memory usage down to only 8GB which will be the launch version.

Though it may be even half that, 4GB of RAM would be very affordable yet very capable on a console with refined specs and no Operating-System overhead. Xbox 360 has done so well on only 512MB of RAM shared between CPU and GPU. 4GB would be 8 times that, that is three Moore's Law doubling, what you'd expect over 6 years. 2013 is 6 years since PS3 launched in Europe.

Absolutely a matter of coding. If next gen console games could cache huge amounts of game assets like textures and models then they could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times. PC's don't do this yet because not enough PCs have the hardware to enable this. Developers have to use methods that will work for a majority. With consoles being uniform it would be easy to implement. If it is then you can expect future PC games to have a similar feature.

Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. Not memory use of software.

So, 8 and 16 mean that they try to decide between 4 and 8 GB in a console. And since they will make in DDR5, current top RAM for videocards, they will want to organize 512 mb chip production to get 8 GB model out.

GDDR5 not DDR5.
DDR5 doesn't exist. GDDR5, like GDDR4, is based on DDR3 but is more optimised for high bandwidth, parallel tasks like graphics processing and GPGPU tasks. GDDR5 might not be appropriate for use as system RAM as far as I know but we will have to wait and see.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

And welcome to America, where the minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and even "real" jobs don't pay as much as equivalent jobs in Australia.

Yet the average American wage is about 15-20% higher than the Aussie average wage, and that's calculated in 'international dollars' which are based on the purchasing power of the US dollar.

Average isn't necessarily median.

Yeah, I was being just a little bit intellectually dishonest there but it did make a few people stop and think about it, so I'll take what I can get.

[explanatory rant deleted]

 

[Treblaine]

Maybe it's a matter of coding, but after assembling so many gaming PCs and benchmarking them I've yet to find a game that gets a consistent advantage from 16GB of System RAM, even the highest speed. Even though it makes us more money we argue against customers requesting 16GB of RAM for a gaming rig as we know we'd be taking advantage of them.

16GB only really comes into it's own for processes that don't need to be fast but deal with a lot, like photoshop, video editing and making 3D models and animations. So basically game development.

8GB is just about ideal for even the most demanding games.

I think a likely scenario is the console plan to launch with 8GB, but the dev-kit models have double the RAM (16GB) just to make it easier to tweak, create and combine elements with the goal on the dev-kit to get the system memory usage down to only 8GB which will be the launch version.

Though it may be even half that, 4GB of RAM would be very affordable yet very capable on a console with refined specs and no Operating-System overhead. Xbox 360 has done so well on only 512MB of RAM shared between CPU and GPU. 4GB would be 8 times that, that is three Moore's Law doubling, what you'd expect over 6 years. 2013 is 6 years since PS3 launched in Europe.

Absolutely a matter of coding. If next gen console games could cache huge amounts of game assets like textures and models then they could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times. PC's don't do this yet because not enough PCs have the hardware to enable this. Developers have to use methods that will work for a majority. With consoles being uniform it would be easy to implement. If it is then you can expect future PC games to have a similar feature.

Moore's Law relates to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit. Not memory use of software.

" could potentially eliminate faults like texture pop-in and long load times."

hmm, kinda done that already on 8GB. I told you, 8GB peaks performance even in the most demanding PC games. 16GB only useful for creative software 3D video rendering up to Pixar level. There is a reason to avoid 16GB in a release model, because it will HUGELY increase the cost of the machine yet have very marginal utility at the development projects in mind.

Doesn't system RAM actually use a "number of transistors on an integrated circuit"?

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Doesn't system RAM actually use a "number of transistors on an integrated circuit"?

Well, sure, if you just want to take away all the mystery and magic from the world.

I prefer to think of RAM as using colonies of nanometer scale ants... or when I'm feeling really whimsical, cities of anthropomorphic 1s and 0s.


edit: And yes, I did once mod a case (for someone else, alas) to include an antfarm mounted to the windowed side-panel.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Well ok...as long as it's still a beast. That's pretty much all I expect Playstations to be - powerful, game-playing beasts. No gimmicks, no BS involved, just set it up, put in a disc, use a controller and play a game. And as long as I get that, and PSN is still free, I'm happy to get behind whatever the next Sony console is. I just want the same experience I got from the PS3 but better. Not asking for much.