PS4 Chief Architect Talks About the Console

Mark Cerny the PS4s lead architect has been speaking to Gamasutra about the device.

He says that Sony began thinking about the PS4 in 2007 looking back at how the PS3 had performed.

He said that Sony did not want the PS4 to be a puzzle programmers had to solve to make quality titles.

" The PlayStation 3 was very powerful, but its unfamiliar CELL processor stymied developers. "There was huge performance there, but in order to unlock that performance, you really needed to study it and learn unique ways of using the hardware," said Cerny. "

He repeatedly commented on how the PS4s architecture was designed to be as familiar as possible to developers.


Talking about the GPU he commented that they took the best one currently available and modified it heavily.

" It's ATI Radeon. Getting into specific numbers probably doesn't help clarify the situation much, except we took their most current technology, and performed a large number of modifications to it. "

He also believes that the GPU will be used for more than graphics in the future.

"The vision is using the GPU for graphics and compute simultaneously," he said. "Our belief is that by the middle of the PlayStation 4 console lifetime, asynchronous compute is a very large and important part of games technology."

and Sony made a number of custom modifications to ensure that this is possible and the data busses do not become a bottleneck in the system.


Talking about the amount and speed of RAM which has received a lot of praise he had this to say:

"The 'supercharged' part, a lot of that comes from the use of the single unified pool of high-speed memory," said Cerny. The PS4 packs 8GB of GDDR5 RAM that's easily and fully addressable by both the CPU and GPU. "

He finished off by saying that he believes the launch lineup will be the strongest for a Playstation device ever.

"The launch lineup for PlayStation 4 -- though I unfortunately can’t give the title count -- is going to be stronger than any prior PlayStation hardware. And that's a result of that familiarity,"


Read the full interview at Gamasutra