Sony Confirms PlayStation 4 Successor

AlphaAtlas

AlphaAtlas

[H]ard|Gawd
Staff member
Joined
Mar 3, 2018
Messages
1,713
Plenty of Playstation 5 rumors have been swirling around, but they're all just rumors. However, Sony's CEO Kenichiro Yoshida recently told the Financial Times that "At this point, what I can say is it’s necessary to have a next-generation hardware." While the next gen console wasn't named, the Times's sources also mentioned that the new device "might not represent a major departure from the PS4, and that the fundamental architecture would be similar." Previous rumors suggest that AMD designed Navi with the PS5 in mind, which makes that claim particularly interesting.


Microsoft’s Phil Spencer did reveal that Xbox was currently “architecting” its next generation consoles at E3 2018, however the reveal was similarly cryptic. Once again, the two rivals seem to be treading a similar path, as Microsoft’s Project xCloud gaming service hopes to reinvent how video game streaming works to a variety of devices.
 
So the rumors about "backward compatibility" with PS4 may be true in that case, if the architecture is the same with just an updated SOC under the hood. The console industry may very well be moving to the cell phone industry's strategy of incremental updates from here on out.
 
Armenius said:
So the rumors about "backward compatibility" with PS4 may be true in that case, if the architecture is the same with just an updated SOC under the hood. The console industry may very well be moving to the cell phone industry's strategy of incremental updates from here on out.
Click to expand...

Which isn't surprising; consoles are just low end PCs running stripped down OSes at this point anyway. Also remember there really wasn't a CPU upgrade this generation; the CPU in the PS4/XB1 is about the same as the XB360's CPU, and weaker then the Cell by a significant amount. And surprise, it's the CPU holding this generation back; 4k really wasn't in mind when this generation's specs were laid out.
 
gamerk2 said:
Which isn't surprising; consoles are just low end PCs running stripped down OSes at this point anyway. Also remember there really wasn't a CPU upgrade this generation; the CPU in the PS4/XB1 is about the same as the XB360's CPU, and weaker then the Cell by a significant amount. And surprise, it's the CPU holding this generation back; 4k really wasn't in mind when this generation's specs were laid out.
Click to expand...
Hardly. The CPU in the Xbox 360 was a tricore PowerPC. Completely different architecture, though I agree that as far as performance goes they are very similar (115 GFLOP/s in the Xbox 360 vs. 102 in the Playstation 4). Could say it was a downgrade on the CPU side of things. Both Sony and Microsoft made the mistake in believing that a more powerful GPU would make up for the weaker CPU.
 
Let me guess, they're going to target real 4K at 30fps. It's not like they're going to be able to target 60fps and 1080p isn't marketable anymore.
With the mid-life upgrades it's getting harder and harder to care about new consoles.
 
What do you think Polaris 12nm is for?
My bets are on a 12nm PS4, bit like the pro but even less of a bump.
 
Domingo said:
Let me guess, they're going to target real 4K at 30fps. It's not like they're going to be able to target 60fps and 1080p isn't marketable anymore.
With the mid-life upgrades it's getting harder and harder to care about new consoles.
Click to expand...

8K downsampled to 4K 60fps (interlaced frames to provide a fluid seamless gameplay superior to pc gaming) to provide a much sharper image than just 'normal 4k' could produce.

Probably should put AI or Quantum in there too for wow sprinkles
 
I'm done buying consoles for myself, I've become a PC gamer the vast majority of the time. My son will probably want new console hardware, but if the past is anything to go by, he always wants to play games on my PC. He has PSVR, but always bugs me to play my Vive.

OnceOver said:
Hope it has a 4K Blu-ray player. The PS4 Pro should've had one. If it can't do solid 4K gaming I don't see the point of another Playstation.
Click to expand...

Why don't you buy an Xbox One S? I've been thinking about it mainly because it's relatively cheap, but in my case, my son already has an Xbox One (and vanilla PS4), so I'm going to hold off.
 
A new console you say? After ps1,2,3,4 and pro i would never have guessed that "5" would be an eventuality. :unsure:
 
Chris_B said:
A new console you say? After ps1,2,3,4 and pro i would never have guessed that "5" would be an eventuality. :unsure:
Click to expand...
Other possible names are just "PlayStation" with no number or "PlayStation X" but will Sony have the courage to do this?
/s (only slightly)
 
Armenius said:
Hardly. The CPU in the Xbox 360 was a tricore PowerPC. Completely different architecture, though I agree that as far as performance goes they are very similar (115 GFLOP/s in the Xbox 360 vs. 102 in the Playstation 4). Could say it was a downgrade on the CPU side of things.
Click to expand...
I think you might be basing those GFLOPS ratings on the GPU in the 360 rather than the CPU - the tri-core PowerPC Xenon CPU should get around ~75 GFLOPS (each core is a derivative of the PPE in the Cell CPU, which itself was capable of around ~25 GFLOPS by itself).
The 8-core AMD Jaguar @ 1.6GHz in the PS4 gets around roughly ~102 GFLOPS.

Integer performance is far greater in the Jaguar CPUs on the current-gen consoles, though, by quite a large margin.
I would imagine, to make up for the loss of the FPU performance on the Jaguar CPU, that most of that task has been off-loaded to the AMD GPUs in the current-gen consoles; the last-gen consoles' GPUs were not capable of FPU-based tasks, as they were both the generation literally right before the unified architecture was released by both AMD/ATI (at the time) and NVIDIA.


Both Sony and Microsoft made the mistake in believing that a more powerful GPU would make up for the weaker CPU.
Click to expand...
I will agree with you to an extent on this, as the CPU in the current-gen consoles is literally the one thing holding it back from most newer AAA games from reaching beyond 30fps, regardless of the resolution - the CPU just cannot keep the GPU fed information properly, resulting in less than 60fps, even though the GPUs on the higher-end consoles are clearly capable of 60fps+.
This obviously doesn't apply to every game out there, though, as less CPU-demanding games and 2D games can easily run at 60fps with native 4K resolutions - really depends on the game and the needs/requirements of the game engine itself.

Take the new Spider-Man game just released, for example, regardless of resolution and console (original/Slim/Pro), the game will always run at 30fps.
Even on the Pro, Spider-Man does have clearly visible graphical improvements, yet still runs at 30fps.

Both Sony and Microsoft are well aware of this, as are a majority of the AAA devs out there, but there just isn't anything further that can be done to improve this, other than clocking the CPU much higher, which for the form factor and power envelope (not to mention the PSU) of the consoles just won't allow.
So, time for a new console generation with (hopefully) a much more powerful CPU.

Even if they don't use an 8-core CPU, it will most certainly be at least a quad-core with SMT to allow for a minimum of 8 threads.
 
Last edited:
Red Falcon said:
I think you might be basing those GFLOPS ratings on the GPU in the 360 rather than the CPU - the tri-core PowerPC Xenon CPU should get around ~75 GFLOPS (each core is a derivative of the PPE in the Cell CPU, which itself was capable of around ~25 GFLOPS by itself).
The 8-core AMD Jaguar @ 2.1GHz in the PS4 gets around roughly ~40 GFLOPS.
Click to expand...

The 360's main CPU across all cores top out at about 105 GFLOPS. The Cell topped out around 240 GFLOPS, though due to programming difficulties around 170-180 GFLOPS was more typical [the Cell was and is a beast]. The real problems were keeping the CPUs adequately fed with data.

GPUs were the huge increase this generation; the PS3 GPU could handle around 190 GFLOPS and the 360s around 240 GLOPS. Meanwhile, both the PS4 and XB1 can easily push over 1500 (XB1) and 1900 (PS4) GFLOPS.

Not sure where you're getting your numbers from.
 
I hope they finally work towards 4K 60Hz (60fps, etc.) playable on TVs via console. Sony has had 120Hz native input support for 1080p for a couple years already (though they only got rid of weird artifacts about a year ago.) Samsung finally put 120Hz native input support on their most recent models. While I'll always have a high end PC for gaming sometimes it's cool to just chill on the couch playing console. (I know I know... Just build a PC for the living room TV and use a controller.)

30fps is just painful to look at after playing on PC. XD
 
So you bought a PS4 for exclusives so did I but I sold mine 2 months ago to two grungy kids hanging out at Gamestop.
Gamestop said my PS4 was defective so they wouldn't buy it for me. So I drove the grungy boy men to the local ATM and got 150.00 for it.
Right now I'm using my PS3 as a DVD player :D If the PS3 DVD player fails I have a PS2 DVD player for a backup :D

PS5 I would'nt touch it with a ten yard stick due to lack of studios and development besides Rockstar, Gorilla Games and Sony it'self. Basically the only PlayStation console that made me feel good about owning one was the PS3 the PS1 comes in a close second due to games like Jumping Flash and Kings Field and shooters like G-Darius and Einhander.
 
Before going any further, when I talk about "GFLOPS", I mean FP32 single-precision FLOPS, just FYI so there is no confusion. :)

gamerk2 said:
The 360's main CPU across all cores top out at about 105 GFLOPS.
Click to expand...
That's very interesting, those cores must be clocked much higher than the PPE is, or have additional functions or features to have that much processing power.
I'm definitely not saying you are wrong or anything, but I am wondering how you are getting that number? (legitimately would like to know)

The PowerPC-based Xenon tri-core CPU @ 3.2GHz should be capable, according to the clock speeds and extreme similarities to the PPE in the Cell, should have around ~75 GFLOPS of computational processing power.
The reason I am stating this is because the PPE, by itself, in the Cell is capable of 25 GFLOPS - multiply this by three at a similar clock speed and it should be around ~75 GFLOPS, especially since both the SPE in the Cell and the three cores in the Xenon are all clocked at 3.2GHz, making for a fairly direct comparison.

Would you happen to have a source for your information on that 105 GFLOPS number by any chance?
Again, I would legitimately like to know as I was not able to find a solid source for it myself.

The Cell topped out around 240 GFLOPS, though due to programming difficulties around 170-180 GFLOPS was more typical [the Cell was and is a beast]. The real problems were keeping the CPUs adequately fed with data.
Click to expand...
Well, the PPE unit in the PowerPC-based Cell @ 3.2GHz had 25 GFLOPS on its own, and each SPE unit had 25 GFLOPS as well - so with the 1 PPE unit and the 8 SPE units, the total should be around ~225 GFLOPS, so if the Cell was clocked a bit higher (assuming optimal performance and optimization like you stated) then your 240 GFLOPS number wouldn't be too far off, if at all.
Mind you, I'm talking about the original vanilla Cell, not the PowerXCell 8i CPU.

In the PS3, one SPE was disabled for better yields from IBM, and one SPE was dedicated to the OS or hypervisor, leaving the Cell in the PS3 with 1 PPE unit and 6 SPE units, for around 150-175 GFLOPS, generally speaking.

GPUs were the huge increase this generation; the PS3 GPU could handle around 190 GFLOPS and the 360s around 240 GLOPS. Meanwhile, both the PS4 and XB1 can easily push over 1500 (XB1) and 1900 (PS4) GFLOPS.
Click to expand...
I will agree with the, and the higher-end consoles have around 5-6 TFLOPS in the GPUs as well.

Not sure where you're getting your numbers from.
Click to expand...
Hopefully what I had written out above helped to explain where my numbers were coming from.
If those number are incorrect, though, I actually would like to know, and if you do have any sources to back your info, please share it as I really would appreciate it, thanks! (y)
 
Last edited:
As a PC gamer I say, "good". More motivation for Bethesda to get back to work on TES6 since they were "waiting for the technology"
 
Red Falcon said:
That's very interesting, those cores must be clocked much higher than the PPE is, or have additional functions or features to have that much processing power.
I'm definitely not saying you are wrong or anything, but I am wondering how you are getting that number? (legitimately would like to know)
Click to expand...

Wikipedia is fun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specifications

The XCPU, named Xenon at Microsoft and "Waternoose" at IBM, is a custom triple-core 64-bit PowerPC-based design by IBM. The CPU emphasized high floating point performance through multiple FPU and SIMD vector processors in each core. The SIMD vector processor (VMX128) was modified for the Xbox to include a dot-product instruction. The dot-product instruction took far less latency than discrete instructions. The VMX128 was also modified by the addition of direct 3D (D3D) compressed data format. This led to an approximate 50 percent savings in required band-width and memory footprint making the CPU having a theoretical peak performance of 115.2 GFLOPS, being capable of 9.6 billion dot products per second.
Click to expand...

While the first Xbox's graphics processing unit was produced by Nvidia, the Xbox 360 had a chip designed by ATI called Xenos. The chip was developed under the name "C1" and "R500" was often used to refer to it.[4] The GPU package contains two separate silicon dies, each built on a 90 nm process with a clock speed of 500 MHz; the GPU proper, manufactured by TSMC and a 10 MB eDRAM daughter-die, manufactured by NEC. Thanks to the daughter die, the Xenos can do 4× MSAA, z-buffering, and alpha blending with no appreciable performance penalty on the GPU.[5] The GPU also houses additional capabilities typically separated into a motherboard chipset in PC systems, effectively replacing the northbridge chip. It has a theoretical peak of 240 GFLOPS. Due to the GPU frequently overheating in early motherboard models, Microsoft revised the GPU heat sink in order to eliminate thermal throttling.
Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications

PS3 CPU-"Cell Broadband Engine"
The PS3 uses the Cell microprocessor, which is made up of one 3.2 GHz PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs). A seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to aspects of the OS and security, and an eighth is a spare to improve production yields. 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.
Click to expand...

According to Nvidia, the RSX—the graphics processing unit (GPU)—is based on the NVIDIA G70 (previously known as NV47) architecture. The GPU is clocked at 500 MHz and makes use of 256 MB GDDR3 RAM clocked at 650 MHz with an effective transmission rate of 1.3 GHz. The RSX has a floating-point performance of 192 GFLOPS.
Click to expand...

A number of other sources also confirm the numbers. Comparing to the PS4/XB1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_technical_specifications
(No Wiki page for the XB1 Technical Specifications? For Shame Wikipedia!)

Regardless, we do have the PS4/PS4 Pro numbers which give the CPU at 102/134 GFLOPS (compared to the PS3's 230 GFLOPS). The GPUs are beasts though; 1800/4200 (!!) GFLOPS, which puts the 192 GFLOPS in the PS3 to shame. XB1 is likely in the same ballpark.
 
Personally I'm okay with a new generation, always felt that the PS3/X360 era was a little long in the tooth. B/C would be a huge plus and probably would get me to upgrade sooner than later (especially since I'm picking up a Pro for Red Dead 2 later this month).

I'm hoping the target will be 60fps standard (checkerboard 4k is okay by me).
 
gamerk2 said:
Wikipedia is fun:
Click to expand...
You know, I have no clue how I missed all of that very obvious information on Wiki... :whistle:
You are right about the 8-core Jaguar having ~102-134 GFLOPS - don't know how my math was so very off on that, so I have gone back to try and fix earlier posts with incorrect information.

Thanks man, you rock! (y)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top