Sony’s Michael Denny has explained the reason why the company did not go with custom chips like the Cell processor. It’s a known fact that the processor was difficult for a lot of developers to get the hang of and plenty of them complained that it was a lot of work for them to offload GPU tasks on the SPUs.
“I think the main reason behind it is that’s what the development community wanted,” he told OPM. “That’s what the development community want in terms of ease of development and making the best games they possibly can.”
“What we bring to the table as Mark was explaining last night was how we architect the system, to make it almost like a supercharged PC specifically for gaming. This is a multitasking system like most PCs are, but this is a still a console made for gaming with gaming at its heart.”
He also revealed that the high speed GDDR5 memory which is also something that’s not common on desktop PCs was a developer focused decision.
“Making decisions like having the 8GB high speed system memory on board is just a massive win for developers in terms of the sort of games they can create and the ease of game development.”
The PS4 has a PC-based architecture and when you combine in the fast unified memory, the system becomes a completely different prospect than the PS3 for the developers. It will be released during the holiday season this year.
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