Deneidez said:
greenmedic88 said:
If Sony goes with an evolutionary hardware design (Wii, 360), rather than starting from a clean sheet of paper (PS2, PS3), from a tech marketing standpoint, the PS4 may not sound as impressive, but so long as it delivers in terms of software, it should be very possible to produce a system that can be sold at a profit for under $400. That's simply by relying upon the natural evolution of semiconductors in memory, CPU and GPUs.
Rather than shooting for the moon with an attempt to reinvent the wheel (and market it as such), simply rely upon the established fact that more performance/data processing capability will be available for less money over time.
Make modest claims about the performance in theory, while consistently outperforming those modest consumer expectations in practice. It would would mean adopting the opposite strategy Sony has followed over the last two console generations where unrealistic claims were made about the hardware that were not realized through the software.
Concentrate for now on continually reducing the production price (as it's being done) as fast as possible to improve profitability until production costs reach a point at which a significant reduction at retail can be made to expand the general user base.
Sony doesn't need a PS4 for that.
Of course a PS4 is still inevitable.
If Sony learns anything from the current generation, it will focus on making the console more accessible from a user interface standpoint and more importantly, from a financial standpoint. It all depends upon the size of the user base they're shooting for: most won't pay even $400 for a new console.
They'll have to make it cheaper than the PS3, and they'll have to sell it either cost, or at a small profit right from the beginning. |
Well, this is about all I think about the matter... Also I am quite sure that nintendos success will shape all consoles in next gen somehow.
@HappySqurriel
They really can't just use multiple CELLs in PS4 and if they are going to make new one that is based on CELL, it would cost quite nicely(again). Of course it would be easy to reuse code that was used with PS3, but still it would introduce even greater problems for new developers.
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It all depends on how they change the Cell to make the CPU for the PS4 ...
In the early days of the Cell processor it was assumed that the PS3 wouldn't have a GPU and would have multiple Cell Processors instead; I can't be certain, but I suspect that many of the design decisions early on would have been focused on this and I wouldn't be surprised to see that you could use the Cell processor as a "Single Core" in a multi-core processor. Beyond that, if you have at least one Power Processor Core and at least 6 SPEs it should be fairly easy to add additional cores to the processor and maintain backwards compatibility; hypothetically speaking, Sony could do something drastic like include hundreds of Stream Processors with how well suited they are for physics calculations.
