At a presentation at the Game Developers Conference today, Sony Senior Staff Engineer Chris Norden went into greater technical detail on some of the PlayStation 4's underlying hardware, including the PS4 Eye depth sensing camera. While all of this information is not finalized and subject to change, the presentation gave us our deepest look yet at Sony's next generation of console hardware.
Norden started by focusing on the chips, including the 64-bit x86 CPU that he stressed provided low power consumption and heat. The eight cores are capable of running eight hardware threads, with each core using a 32KiB L1 I-cache and D-cache, and each four-core group sharing 2MiB of L2 Cache. The processor will be able to handle things like atomics, threads, fibers, and ULTs, with out-of-order execution and advanced ISA.
Sony is building its CPU on what it's calling an extended DirectX 11.1+ feature set, including extra debugging support that is not available on PC platforms. This system will also give developers more direct access to the shader pipeline than they had on the PS3 or through DirectX itself. "This is access you're not used to getting on the PC, and as a result you can do a lot more cool things and have a lot more access to the power of the system," Norden said. A low-level API will also let coders talk directly with the hardware in a way that's "much lower-level than DirectX and OpenGL," but still not quite at the driver level.
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