Full PlayStation 4 specifications

[drkohler]

goddog said:

which is why i am concerned. granted there is a level of focus that can be granted if it is a console vs a PC.  I do also see more builders customizing due to  use of x86 and support from AMD to push this core design ... but again its not 8 real cores its 4 moduels  ... unless its 8 moduels and 16 "cores" 

AMD just revealed die shots of their quad-core Jaguar CPUs. There are true four cores in the chip, not modules with shared fpus etc. XBox/PS4 use two of those chips with glue logic to get to eight cores.

As to hardware, we don't know the whole story by a mile. If you watched the show closely, you would have noticed two things:

1. There is an additional processor/additional silicon doing the "Download while playing" thingie (might also be used in pirating prevention stuff).

2. There is an additional processor/additional silicon doing the compressing/decompressing of video/audio streams (probably a Gaikai speedup thing)

So like in the WiiU, there is additional hardware to relieve cpu/gpu from "ordinary work".