| Gilgamesh said: Will the PS4 be much easier to work with compared to how the PS3 was? |
Any x86 AMD CPU will be easier to program for than the Cell. Any modern unified shader GPU will be superior in every way to the fixed pixel/fragment pipeline RSX.
The white areas are in-game moments where the Cell's SPEs (or called SPUs in the diagram) are being unused for Killzone 2. It doesn't look pretty since the PS3's CPU is unusued nearly 40-50% of the time due to programmers being unable to schedule workload for all 6 SPEs effectively:
So yes, the closer PS4's CPU and GPU are to off-the-shelf PC components, the better it will be for developers to extract maximum performance and do so a lot sooner. For instance, you could just port Crysis 3 from the PC directly to PS4 with minimal optimizations. A custom-designed CPU could be better in theory but so far Sony tried twice and struck out with PS2 and PS3 in this area. Developers vocally complained about how difficult it was to develop for the Cell. I think it's a good decision that Sony is moving away from very custom-based expensive CPU designs. It saves them $ not spending $3-4 billion on R&D for a CPU that may or may not outperform the AMD's off-the-shelf CPUs. Why take such a large risk when they failed to make a fast custom CPU for 2 generations in a row? Also, if Sony's CPU is x86 based, it would make porting PC games to consoles much easier. If Xbox720 also has an x86 CPU, then cross-platform titles would work well across the PC and both next gen consoles, but it would hurt the Wii U the most. The Wii U would not only be left with the slowest CPU but the only non-x86 CPU, requiring additional work to port games to it. If Xbox 720 and PS4 have x86 CPUs, that would be one of the biggest blows to Wii U regarding its future 3rd party support. (Just my opinion).
What has me scratching my head is why go for an 8-core 1.6ghz Jaguar AMD CPU instead of a 65W A10-6700 Richland quad-core APU clocked at 4.3ghz?
http://techreport.com/news/24277/leaked-richland-specs-reveal-higher-clock-speeds
Since each Richland core is faster per clock than a Jaguar core, 4 Richland cores @ 4.3ghz is a much better setup than an 8-core Jaguar CPU clocked at 1.6ghz. The GPU inside Richland is also faster than inside Jaguar. I really don't understand why MS and Sony would not go for a quad-core Richland, unless they think 65W TDP is too high for a CPU, or it's too expensive for them.
