Sony's Mark Cerny to Detail PS5 Architecture March 18th

[Raevenlord]

Sony has announced via Twitter that their lead system architect Mark Cerny will "provide a deep dive into PS5's system architecture, and how it will shape the future of games" tomorrow. This is likely the start of Sony's marketing campaign for the release of the PS5 which is due out Holidays 2020.

The Japanese company has remained puzzlingly tight-lipped regarding their next-gen games console, which is a far cry from Microsoft's position, who have been releasing details and teasing their next-gen Xbox Series X system for a while now. It remains to be seen how Sony's system will differ from Microsoft's Xbox Series X, since most specs are rumored to be close on both consoles. The underlying Zen 2 architecture for the CPUs is confirmed in both consoles, and so should the fabrication process and RDNA2-based graphics with dedicated ray tracing hardware. It remains to be seen how the companies will aim to differentiate their offerings.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

Finally both are showing their hand, at least a bit.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

With the games exclusives and the available contents upon release.

You need guidance bro , relativity , none.
Heaven knows why you quoted me.

Hopefully there are features, and uses unbeknownst to us yet.

 

[Mega-Japan]

If the PS5 truly has backwards compatibility to all PlayStations before it, isn't region-locked (not just for games, but BluRays also), AND can play 4K UHD BluRay discs, it's no contest, day 1 purchase for me.

 

[Devastator0]

If the PS5 truly has backwards compatibility to all PlayStations before it, isn't region-locked (not just for games, but BluRays also), AND can play 4K UHD BluRay discs, it's no contest, day 1 purchase for me.

100% for me as well, if this does pan out, they'll have my money.

 

[Rahnak]

I wouldn't hold out too much hope for backwards compatibility with all previous generations. They only confirmed it for PS4 and given the difference in architecture and complexity of some of the older systems (looking at you, PS3), I wouldn't bet on it.

 

[ARF]

I wouldn't hold out too much hope for backwards compatibility with all previous generations. They only confirmed it for PS4 and given the difference in architecture and complexity of some of the older systems (looking at you, PS3), I wouldn't bet on it.

The Cell processor in the PS3 is revolutionary and still epic, by its standards, the current AMD's Ryzen is a big meh..

Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips?

In case you missed the news, Sony's PlayStation celebrated its 25th birthday last week. Throughout the generations, the PlayStation has often been a platform leader when it comes to technology. Of the four Sony consoles released, the PS3 stands out among them. By far the least successful of the f

www.gtplanet.net

In an interview with Gameinformer celebrating the brand’s 25th anniversary, van der Leeuw had some interesting thoughts to share:

“Even desktop chips nowadays, the fastest Intel stuff you can buy, is not by far as powerful as the Cell CPU, but it’s very difficult to get power out of the Cell.
“I think it was ahead of its age, because it was a little bit more like how GPUs work nowadays, but it was maybe not balanced nicely and it was too hard to use. It overshot a little bit in power and undershot in usability, but it was definitely visionary.”

I miss it so much

 

[BArms]

The Cell processor in the PS3 is revolutionary and still epic, by its standards, the current AMD's Ryzen is a big meh..

Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips?

In case you missed the news, Sony's PlayStation celebrated its 25th birthday last week. Throughout the generations, the PlayStation has often been a platform leader when it comes to technology. Of the four Sony consoles released, the PS3 stands out among them. By far the least successful of the f

www.gtplanet.net

I miss it so much

Cell was cool but all we heard was how hard it was to program for. I wonder if any of the top 10% PS3/Xbox programmers ever miss it.

 

[Lionheart]

The Cell processor in the PS3 is revolutionary and still epic, by its standards, the current AMD's Ryzen is a big meh..

 

[ARF]

Cell was cool but all we heard was how hard it was to program for. I wonder if any of the top 10% PS3/Xbox programmers ever miss it.

The only thing they care about is how to offer cheap and with extremely low skills and efforts console ports for the PC.

But if you read the link, you would see the following:

I think the Gran Turismo games are a very fine example on what the console can do at its utmost potential. There's been some other impressive titles such as Namco's fighting game franchises (Tekken and Soul Calibur) that keep the frame rate locked at 60 FPS while sparing little to no expense for detail, especially Soul Calibur V which still looks gorgeous even today on what most would call dated hardware. Grand Theft Auto V is another feat; a game as detailed and as complex as that, I would have never imagined it would be possible on the PS3, but the developers wrangled their talent to make it happen, and I'm sure the Cell CPU proved to be invaluable with its strength to make it happen as well.

There's also the Uncharted series, which was initially developed by ICE Team (now known today as Naughty Dog) who was basically a first-party low-level development team that knew how to master the PS3 hardware with their development techniques simply because they helped create both the hardware and the software development kits that other developers would use later on; with the release of The Last of Us in 2013, they went onward to solidify their proof of mastery with probably one of the most (if not THE most) impressive-looking titles on the console.

Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips?

This is the discussion thread for a recent post on GTPlanet: Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips? This article was published by Michael Leary (@Terronium-12) on December 10th, 2019 in the Hardware category.

www.gtplanet.net

 

[R-T-B]

The Cell processor in the PS3 is revolutionary and still epic, by its standards, the current AMD's Ryzen is a big meh..

Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips?

In case you missed the news, Sony's PlayStation celebrated its 25th birthday last week. Throughout the generations, the PlayStation has often been a platform leader when it comes to technology. Of the four Sony consoles released, the PS3 stands out among them. By far the least successful of the f

www.gtplanet.net

I miss it so much

LOL, cell is a many-cored (8 at best) neutered PPC970, AKA a many core version of a non-speculative Apple G5 CPU. You can trace it's lineage right through IBM. It's like a bunch of bloody atoms glued together.

It was cool, once. Now it'd be a joke.

 

[ValenOne]

The Cell processor in the PS3 is revolutionary and still epic, by its standards, the current AMD's Ryzen is a big meh..

Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips?

In case you missed the news, Sony's PlayStation celebrated its 25th birthday last week. Throughout the generations, the PlayStation has often been a platform leader when it comes to technology. Of the four Sony consoles released, the PS3 stands out among them. By far the least successful of the f

www.gtplanet.net

I miss it so much

My PC can emulate PS3 with good frame rates.

For example,

Tell your Sony programmer that "teh CELL" has been emulated on Intel Core i7 8700K

 

[JAB Creations]

The Cell processor in the PS3 is revolutionary and still epic, by its standards, the current AMD's Ryzen is a big meh..

This is the second comment of yours I've come across today. I'm trying to be friendly here: please try to think what a mature adult would say and if you're not sure then just don't post that thought. Zen 2 rocks and while it might not be exciting a blanket comment like that is not going to earn you any credit except with blind fan boys. Something much more appropriate might go along the lines of, "I'm not thrilled with how Zen 2 overclocks, it's not as much fun as X CPU." That kind of comment would come across much more mature and conducive to conversation for a much greater number of people reading comments.

 

[Vayra86]

The only thing they care about is how to offer cheap and with extremely low skills and efforts console ports for the PC.

But if you read the link, you would see the following:

Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips?

This is the discussion thread for a recent post on GTPlanet: Is PlayStation 3's Cell Processor Still More Powerful Than Modern Desktop Chips? This article was published by Michael Leary (@Terronium-12) on December 10th, 2019 in the Hardware category.

www.gtplanet.net

Lol. Keeping the fps locked at 60 with no sacrifice of detail is now attributable to the Cell's CPU capabilities? If I recall the GPU was an Nvidia something... I do remember the glitchy home menu of the PS3 and how it struggled on framerate when it was ever opened during a game. I believe they hard limited the FPS of that menu in game to 30 at least. A menu that has what, 40 items total?

The article makes zero sense, but an educated reader can get that from the title alone. Of course its not faster and it never was. Its a patchwork PowerPC. For its time it was certainly unique in the consumer world, yes. Too bad it was effectively a design failure because economically the PS3 wasn't that viable for Sony, and they quickly axed the original version and some of its features.

 

[ARF]

PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves a theoretical maximum of 230.4 GFLOPS in single precision floating point operations and up to 15 GFLOPS double precision[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications#cite_note-pacellperf-1

PlayStation 3 technical specifications - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core 62.56 GFLOPS in https://ranker.sisoftware.co.uk/sho...6f6d0b984b593fbc6f3d5ad90a187e287ba8aacdfe2da

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core (SGEMM) GFLOPS performance 546 GFLOPS https://gadgetversus.com/processor/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-vs-amd-ryzen-7-3700x/

A beefed Cell on N7 would run circles over the Ryzen 7 3700X.
That with a Navi 23 would be a much better system overall.

 

[Vayra86]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications#cite_note-pacellperf-1

PlayStation 3 technical specifications - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core 62.56 GFLOPS in https://ranker.sisoftware.co.uk/sho...6f6d0b984b593fbc6f3d5ad90a187e287ba8aacdfe2da

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core (SGEMM) GFLOPS performance 546 GFLOPS https://gadgetversus.com/processor/amd-ryzen-9-3900x-vs-amd-ryzen-7-3700x/

A beefed Cell on N7 would run circles over the Ryzen 7 3700X.
That with a Navi 23 would be a much better system overall.

Note the key word

Theoretical

 

[ARF]

 

[Vayra86]

Never knew that they actually spelled Ryzen as J.A.G.U.A.R.

Did you?

If you want to keep spouting BS, TPU's probably not your favorite place to be. Try Reddit

 

[Rahnak]

What that video also doesn't tell you is that TLoU ran at 30 fps on the PS3 and the remastered version on PS4 ran at 60 fps, besides the upgraded graphics and draw distances. And like Vayra pointed out, PS4 isn't even using Ryzen, it's a super weak-sauce cpu meant for netbooks.

Cell might've been cool from an architecture standpoint but as a console cpu it was a pretty big failure.

 

[sepheronx]

PS5 Deep-Dive Reveal

 

[Rahnak]

They're more different than I expected.

Aaand that was pretty underwhelming. I was hoping to see the actual console, some demos. Kinda felt like they're a little behind schedule. All in all, it seems like they're trying to innovate more than MS, which just seems like better specs all around and call it a day. Innovation in the console space doesn't work too well though, traditionally.

 

[Mega-Japan]

I wouldn't hold out too much hope for backwards compatibility with all previous generations. They only confirmed it for PS4 and given the difference in architecture and complexity of some of the older systems (looking at you, PS3), I wouldn't bet on it.

Yeah so I ain't holding my breath. If it doesn't have those features, I'd just wait for the "PS5 Slim/Pro" or equivalent. Easy choice. I'm in no rush.

 

[Calmmo]

In short, they are buying a cheaper APU from AMD than microsoft. Maybe i missed it but all i got is 16gb gddr, but nothing about speed.

 

[Rahnak]

In short, they are buying a cheaper APU from AMD than microsoft. Maybe i missed it but all i got is 16gb gddr, but nothing about speed.

CPU is running at 3.4 Ghz (typically, variable frequency).
GPU is 36 CUs running at 2.23Ghz (typically, variable frequency) which is about 10.28 TFLOPs.
There's also the 16 GB of GDDR6 ram @ 448GB/s and a custom 825GB SSD.

That's the gist of it.

 

[ARF]

They have to go back to the Cell. The picture is not so dark and dire as some of you are painting it.

The PlayStation Supercomputer

The chip that started in the PlayStation 3 ended up in the world’s fastest supercomputer, and heralded a heterogeneous computing future

www.datacenterdynamics.com

“We were just a tad too early. There were a number of near misses. For example, OpenCL, the open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems, came just too late.”

Hofstee also believes that one could have taken a compiler from supercomputer manufacturer Cray “and retargeted it to a Cell chip, basically by thinking of the local store as a large vector register file.” At the time, he didn’t think there were any open Cray compilers around, but later discovered the Department of Energy had open-sourced one.


“There were plans to have a second generation Cell which was supposed to have 32 SPEs and four Power processing elements, and scale it up,” Professor Gaurav Khanna told DCD.

And those papers were made possible with an unusually affordable set up. “We did some nice estimates on how much it would have cost with a conventional system, it was easily tenfold. Essentially, one $400 PlayStation was equivalent in performance to 16-32 cores of your several-thousand-dollar Xeon-class x86 server.”
As for energy efficiency, a “PlayStation on full load would consume about 100 watts of power; and at that time a Xeon-class dual socket type server would easily take about a kilowatt. It was quite remarkable.”