Consoles Are Dead,Long Live the PC?
The PlayStation 4 was announced last week (not launched, though) and surprise, surprise! It’s pretty much, completely a PC. Or at least, from the inside. Also, the next Microsoft Xbox is supposed to have the exact specifications, internally, so that’s going to be a PC too.
So does this mean the end of the old Consoles vs PC debate?
AMD’s landed themselves a pretty grand deal with both the console giants, and the company is set to supply 8-core APUs to MS and Sony for next-gen consoles.
The APU in question hasn’t been officially released by AMD yet, but it comprises of 8 ‘Jaguar’ cores, which will replace AMD’s current low-power Brazos 2.0 processors.
The PS4 will include 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, and the memory interface is unified, which means that both the CPU and GPU components will have access to 170 GB/s of memory bandwidth at their disposal, which is excellent, as APUs love memory bandwidth, and this is around 8x of what an A10-5800K gets exposed to on a desktop PC.
The GPU part is most likely based on AMD’s GCN architecture found in its Radeon HD 7000 series and Trinity APUs. The one used in the PS4 boasts 18 compute units and outputs 1.84 TFLOPS of floating point performance, which is in the vicinity of the Radeon HD 7850.
There’s a large local HDD (possibly 500GB), so that’s another plus point, and well, that’s the end of the internal talk.
On the outside, the PS4 does have some interesting stuff. The new Eye is obviously better than the previous one for the PS3.
Oh, and lest I forget, the new controller, which looks similar to the old one is indeed better, in some way I guess. And yes, you can use it to share stuff on FaceBook! But, then there’s the streaming business to deal with.
Also, you’ll be able to stream games to your PS Vita, in a process similar to what Nvidia envisioned with Project Shield.
You’ll also be able to video chat, stream gameplay and do a lot of online social stuff that all major companies now think you should be doing. But random cynicism aside, it’s clear that while the PS4 doesn’t quite stand up to mid-segment PCs today, much less by ‘holiday 2013’ (which means a Q3 launch in the US), it’s a genuine improvement over the previous generation. It’s also probably cheaper for Sony (and will be for Microsoft too) to use standard (slightly customised) PC components; I’m sure AMD loves this arrangement as well, they’ve not had very happy times recently. I also believe it proves that the x86 ISA is one of the most powerful chips in mainstream computing today, and in a year we’ll be able to see if Intel can rival ARM’s efficiency lead as well.
So much for all the ‘PCs are dead’ rhetoric we’ve been hearing for the past few years, especially the last three of them.
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