The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/playstation-4/all/

by freshrap6 • 13 years ago

99 121 13 years ago

sjtgraham• 13 years ago

The Cerny Method sounds remarkably like the Lean Startup Method, but apparently pre-dates it quite significantly.

quanticle3• 13 years ago

That's exactly what I was going to say. Even the terminology, "publishable first playable" echoes the "minimum viable product" terminology that's in vogue with lean startup practitioners.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

Agreed, and to their credit both are designed to solve the same problem which is to maximize the likelyhood that you're spending the money on the right thing. Long gone are the days when some decides to plop down a million dollars to make some random game, that will be first seen by customers when it is in the retail box.

Tiktaalik• 13 years ago

The product of this style of production is most often called a "vertical slice." A slice of cake has just a thin amount of cake, but it contains every layer of cake. In this analogy the cake is the whole game and the vertical slice is a tiny snippit of the game (ie. a short level) where all features (every layer of cake) of the core functionality of the game is present.

infinii• 13 years ago

I had the exact same thoughts while reading the article. Cerny created MVPs of games, got feedback and would pivot/change based on user feedback. And he did this in the mid 90's!!

robmcm9• 13 years ago

It's not a MVP if you have to build the whole game engine, but it's simular I guess.

robmcm9• 13 years ago

I think this approach is evident in Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeros (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-04-metal-gear-soli...).

It's a level of the main game, but they are actually releasing it for $29. Taking this approach to the next level!

ye• 13 years ago

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system.

I don't get what the hype is about.

Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price. But that will only be the case for a few months. PCs will catch up very quickly and will become cheaper, and then much cheaper.

As somebody who loves games, I don't see a reason to buy PS4. I'd rather spend a bit more on a PC, and then upgrade it as I go.

The positive thing I see is the PS4 <-> PC game portability. No longer developers need to have to very different engines and codebases. That's why PS4 is a much better option than XBox One in my eyes.

quanticle3• 13 years ago

The XBox One is an x86 architecture as well. Pretty much everything that you said about the PS4 also applies to XBox One. Now, there are differences between the consoles, but fundamentally both of the next-gen consoles are x86 CPUs tied to memory architectures that are designed to stream HD content to the screen as fast as possible.

ewzimm8• 13 years ago

What does processor architecture even matter to a consumer? Is the Xbox 360 a pre-Intel Mac because it uses PowerPC archictecture? I don't see why so many people mention this. Consoles have always been about custom software, not unique hardware architecture.

toki5• 13 years ago

I don't get what the hype is about.

It's a video game console. Genuine question: what's confusing here?

dntrkv2• 13 years ago

Why would I get a mac, when I could get a PC for much cheaper and it will be faster and I'll have more control over the hardware. Why would I get a iPhone, I can get a cheaper Android and have more control over how I use it. Why would I buy Windows when I can get Linux which is more powerful, customizable, and free.

Not everything can be reduced down to specs and numbers. Everyone has different use-cases.

Ralz• 13 years ago

This is beautiful.

voidlogic6• 13 years ago

Funny, this is why I use a PC running Linux and an Android phone... and wait- so does my Grandma... And we have very different use cases.

tadfisher• 13 years ago

PS4 is just a PC stuck in one configuration, linked to a popular delivery system.

You've belied the true strength of video game consoles. A single configuration means less testing work and a streamlined experience for consumers. Not everyone is willing to deal with graphics drivers and endless installers.

WhaleBiologist• 13 years ago

Not everyone is willing to deal with graphics drivers and endless installers.

To be fair this is much simpler now than it was 5-6 years ago.

chucknelson3• 13 years ago

Which also leads to crazy optimization against the stable hardware. Just look at what PS3 and Xbox 360 are pushing out with ~512 MB RAM and 7+ year old hardware. It's pretty incredible.

Arelius9• 13 years ago

Well you get a few benefits.

stuck in one configuration

This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations.

And just in reliability and testing. You can be sure that your exact hardware, with a nearly identical software load has been tested countless times. This is why you can often find games run much smoother on a 5 year old machine, to a modern PC.

Additionally API's are significant the fact that I can allocate memory directly on the PS4, and know that it won't ever be paged to disk is pretty significant. Additionally, Sony's rendering API's are much closer to the actual hardware, which give you much more flexibility in usage.

Then there are a few differences in the particular set of hardware that give it a good advantages to current PCs notably all 8 gbs of memory is GDDR5, which is very fast. And additionally, it's all shared, and cache-coherent between the GPU and the CPU which is really quite significant.

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

This is a massive benefit to development everywhere. Additionally to really being able to push the hardware to the limit. It's a lot easier to learn how to properly "abuse" a single configuration then thousands of different pieces of hardware in millions of different configurations.

This is most obvious near the end of a console's life after developers master the hardware. Compare launch games and final releases for any console.

Impossible• 13 years ago

Huh, Xbox One and PS4 are very close architecturally, beyond both being x86 based. Xbox One is closer to a Windows 8 PC on the software side, assuming you have a DX11 based game that runs on WinRT, which could make lazy ports easier. In practice anyone that would benefit from a lazy port is probably an indie developer, and is using Unity, Monogame or another higher level framework (or OpenGL and C++ for a weird minority) and AAA developers can't do lazy ports because the performance just won't be competitive.

PS4 isn't really close to an existing set of APIs, although it's possible that Mantle (AMD's low level graphics API) is the same or very close to the PS4 graphics API. There are low level specifics like unified memory, asynchronous compute, and Xbox One ESRAM that make neither system look like current PCs, although future PCs might adopt them through new API specs or hardware configurations.

Steam Machine fits your description more accurately, but even it's a little weird in that a lot of games don't support Linux.

jokoon• 13 years ago

The hype is that games will be much easier to program, so that's why it's much closer to PC programming. the CELL processor was very hard to use, and that was a big drag because it slows down developers considerably.

The good thing is that games will be made faster and with less difficulty. That will obviously improve game quality since it will reduce game making costs, I guess it will take much less time to make an engine and maintain it.

As for your comparison with a PC, you should not compare those, because all console are the same, which allows programmers to target a single configuration and optimize as much as possible, while on PC, programmers have to adapt their code for different configurations and drivers, but also require to offer multiple options to adapt to each configuration because PCs never perform the same.

To sum it up, there are no "minimum configuration" when releasing a game on console. Console have a better performance/price ratio. The PS4 would really make an interesting platform now that's easier to make a game on it, especially if it's dedicated to games, not like PC where the OS can suck a lot of resources you might want to allocate on your game.

ferparra• 13 years ago

Why yes... it is the same old x86 we run on our PC configurations, but that's just the instruction set we're talking about. Just look at the hardware and chip configuration, it's not a regular PC setup, they have some serious innovation going on there. You've got 8GB of GDDR5 memory, plus a very modern, custom designed GPU embedded in the same CPU dye. Sony has always launched systems that resist time, and I wouldn't be surprised if the PS4 stayed around for the next 4/5 years to come.

ekianjo2• 13 years ago

Yes, it's a pretty good configuration at a reasonable price

Not even. Actually for a repackaged PC (which is more or less what it is), I find the launch price relatively expensive. I have also heard that both Sony and Microsoft took the strategy for this generation to make money on the hardware itself from day 1, so they are not selling anything at loss, apparently.

benched• 13 years ago

Over twenty years of this, the only reason I have ever bought any console is for exclusive games.

pandaman4• 13 years ago

PC's GPU is hidden behind layers of APIs. It does not matter when you compare different hardware on PC as any hardware there is boggled by the same APIs but it makes no sense to compare the same hardware on PC to a game console that exposes GPU directly.

It's like comparing JavaScript to native apps. Yes, sometimes JS can be pretty close and JS on powerful hardware can even beat native code on a weaker platform on some tests. Yet it would be very naive to think that JS nowadays runs faster than any native code on 10 y.o. hardware. Similarly, it will be a long while till DirectX/OpenGL apps will be unquestionably faster than native GPU code.

Mikeb853• 13 years ago

I don't get what the hype is about.

Video game consoles are entirely about experience. PC gaming and console gaming are entirely different. It's not just about graphics, it's about the controller, the immersive experience of playing on a TV screen in your living room (I know PCs can do that too, but for the average person it can be a hassle to set everything up).

For developers it's a single target that never moves.

Peoples' love for consoles is shown by the fact that many people still play on consoles that are 10-25 years old. I still play games on a PS1 occasionally.

bradleyjg• 13 years ago

The PS4 may well make for a better video game machine and more profit for Sony, but it's too bad the very interesting and powerful cell processor concept will be relegated to the dustbin.

ginko2• 13 years ago

The APU in the PS4 picks up many ideas from the Cell processor. You have some heavy cores for program logic and many small ones for graphics and computation tasks. Both on the same piece of silicon and attached to the same memory space.

ekianjo2• 13 years ago

Maybe, but it does not seem to be very powerful at all. I've seen most of the upcoming games for launch (and played about half of them) and I was far from being impressed. It feels like a mid-range gaming PC kind of power at best, and many games apparently struggled to run in full HD, with the framerate low enough to make you feel you were back in the PS2 days. If they are planning to sell these consoles solely on the graphics, they'll have a tough time.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 13 years ago

The Cell design was interesting, but it was obvious that chip multiprocessors would win. The argument is similar to why x86 continues to prevail vs RISC and VLIW: supporting x86 is only a modest constant factor in transistor count but preserves access to the existing software ecosystem. The latter trumps the pennies per part the x86 decoders add.

Likewise with chip multiprocessors vs systolic arrays: making a core fully general and with proper cache coherant memory access isn't that expensive in transistors, and allows you to leverage existing multi-threaded code.

Systolic arrays still have a future in true embeded devices: radar processing is a good example.

Oh, and before you point to the AMD architecture as being Cell-like, it's not at all. Unified virtual memory instead of Cell's complex 2 level store. Cell requires the CPU to manage DMA's to the APU's, on Fusion you can just pass a pointer. CPU and APU instruction sets are entirely decoupled on Fusion. APU supports thread pre-emption.

In any case, the lesson here is obvious: design hardware in opposition to the existing software ecosystem in your industry, and you'll make something that is academically interesting but struggles to deliver value to end products.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

The x86 vs RISC debate is a perfect example of how technological advances can confound seemingly simple tradeoffs. There's simply no such thing as a CISC processor anymore. All "x86" processors have RISC internals and use micro-op translation to present an x86 ISA at a software level. As you point out, the same sort of dynamics play out at every level. There's only so much advantage that simplified core designs get you, since the overhead for "legacy" support tends to be small.

It'll be interesting to see how Intel's x86 SoC development pans out. With the Atom they weren't really aiming for the SoC market and only recently have they actually bothered to try to do so. Even with their first generation stuff they've produced pretty competitive, to ARM, results, given Intel's research muscle and their FAB capacity it wouldn't be surprising to see a lot more x86-SoC based smartphones and tablets hitting the market in the coming years.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

You don't put an experimental design into production on day 1. This is similar to the classic "let's rewrite the whole thing" problem. Maturity of a platform is an important factor, and it's often difficult to pinpoint all of the particular aspects behind the maturity of a given platform.

Intel made the same mistake with the IA64/Epic/Itanium architecture. They were banking on that to be the future of high performance computing and then AMD kicked their ass by using an iterative approach with x86-64. The irony is that today the Itanium architecture is actually pretty good, finally, but it's been relegated to a tiny market niche.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

This was a good read, and the narrative between Sony's launch and Microsoft's launch has the feel of some pretty classic hero's journey stuff in it.

The interesting upstart this time seems to be the SteamBox.

paulftw• 13 years ago

They should have mentioned the number of titles at launch for xbox one. If ease of making games is such a big deal why aren't there any facts on how far behind their main competitor is.

mindrag• 13 years ago

Because that will be forgotten in a matter of weeks as more titles begin to roll out for both platforms.

Narishma• 13 years ago

Xbox One only launches with a couple more retail titles. PS4 launches with a dozen or so more PSN titles.

6ren2• 13 years ago

I'm seeing a pattern, a cycle between hubris and humility.

When Nintendo ruled, Sony broke in by courting game developers. Then, they became arrogant, and made the best hardware they could, they was difficult to use. Thus, Microsoft won, simply because it was easier for developers. It was then amazing to see how arrogant they had become with the xboxone trying to squeeze everyone, in every way - similar to how they removed the ability to cancel xbox live online.

What Microsoft didn't realize is that they didn't win - Sony lost, by shooting themselves in the foot. But in this generation, if PS4 is easy to develop for, cheaper, more powerful, and not trying to squeeze every cent and control every aspect... things will be different.

Of course, Microsoft will see their mistake and adjust (as they've done many times). But while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful. Also, next year, mobile devices should reach GPU parity with last gen consoles... and with their faster iteration cycle, match PS4/xboxone three years after that. (unlike CPUs, GPUs scale really well).

Keyframe2• 13 years ago

I get what you're saying, but Microsoft never won any console race http://www.geekwire.com/2013/xbox-360-wii-ps3-won-console-ge...

abarringer• 13 years ago

From the original article.

"When the PS3 launched, according to most estimates, Sony controlled about 70 percent of the console market. Seven years later, it’s on even terms with Microsoft, whose Xbox 360 outsold the PS3 in the U.S. for 32 consecutive months."

Going from 70% to "even" with Microsoft seems like a non-win?

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

That graph is incredible. I had no idea holidays mattered so much. They may as well be the reason the industry exists.

InclinedPlane4• 13 years ago

Naive interpretations of the current console generation will lead to incorrect conclusions.

Microsoft unequivocally won the 360/ps3/wii console generation. Not because they shipped more consoles, no console maker actually makes the majority of their profit from raw console shipments, it's a very misleading figure. What matters more are sales of games and DLC and subscriptions to services. In those measures the 360 has been trouncing every other console maker. People who own 360s spend more time playing the console, they spend more money buying physical games, and they spend more money buying DLC and subscribing to xbox live gold. Microsoft does more business on higher margin items than other console makers.

The Wii made ok money for Nintendo but the sales dropped off really fast, and people didn't end up playing it much, or buying many games for it. The PS3 took a long time to reach a state of maturity where there was a sufficient stock of good games on the console to actually justify owning one. And eventually the PS3 managed to get to a state where it was actually doing well. But from a business perspective no matter how much better it was doing the 360 continued to outpace it (in game sales especially). These are some of the major reasons why there even is a new console generation this year, Nintendo and Sony need to put themselves on a new footing in order to have a chance of growing their market share.

sliverstorm2• 13 years ago

First I will note that Sony hardware has reputedly never been easy to develop for, so the PS3 wasn't anything new there.

Second, you state while they can drop prices and relax controls, it may be difficult to make their console more powerful. We still don't know how the dice will land in this regard. Microsoft managed higher-than-expected frequency yield, and nobody knows where Sony's chip sits. It also remains to be seen how the SRAM vs GDDR5 plays out.

jasonwatkinspdx2• 13 years ago

It was a different world then, but the original PSX was pretty straightforward. A commodity MIPS processor, relatively straightforward vector and image co-processors. In particular Sony made a bet that ram prices would fall enough to make the console profitable long term and that bet payed out. To remember how much things have changed, the CDROM format was controversial then, but was a huge win for developers.

Bluntly, Sony got it right with the PSX in making it very approachable for developers. They messed that up with PS2 and they should have learned that then. Instead they doubled down on the same misguided approach with the PS3 to predictable results. I'm glad to see they're not going to make the same mistake again.

Source: I was a subcontractor on a PSX title years ago.

lucian19005• 13 years ago

There is no debate about the hardware, really. The PS4 is the more powerful console in every single way.

What makes the Xbox One hardware interesting is the Kinect.

cromwellian• 13 years ago

I highly doubt that assertion, it's a handwavy extrapolation. The current GPUs have significantly higher TDP, 3 years ago, state of the art GPUs had 3 Billion transistors and power consumption over 150W.

The Playstation 3 is based on 2004 era (cut down G70 )chip designs, so you're talking mobile devices next year catching up with a chip that's almost ten years ago, based on a 90nm processor node. Today's PS4 will be based on a 28nm node, there's no way in 3 years you're going to shrink the PS4 GPU and 8GB of GDDR5 to fit into an iPhone like device and not heat up like a welding torch and drain the battery like a blackhole.

It's a common, but incorrect assertion that mobile devices are going to replace game consoles. It might replace them for casual gamers, but not hard-core gamers. I don't know anyone who wants to play CoD or Half Life 2 on a mobile device. They want to play them on a high end PC, console, or SteamBox.

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

Every single time I see someone say "Things in the future aren't going to see huge performance increases like that." I smile, because the beauty of the future is that we don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe in ten years we'll all have crazy brain implants made possible by some new awesome technology, and we'll be watching pinar movies as these devices render them in real time.

Probably not likely, but I'm not going to make any absolute claims about anything.

kayoone2• 13 years ago

The notion that mobile GPUs will soon overtake console GPUs is nonsense, yet i hear it over and over since the iPad2 days. Even the latest iPad Air is still quite far off a Xbox360, they might catch up during the next 2 years but then we have a completely new console generation anyway.

If mobile GPUs will reach a point where they are good enough, thats an entirely different story, but that still leaves you with subpar controls and very casual games.

I also dont think it matters much if the XBox One is a tiny bit slower than the PS4, console exclusive titles will get even more rare in the future and the difference in visual quality between the due is negligible, as in hardly to be seen by the human eye.

lucian19005• 13 years ago

They're more "different" than "weak" nowadays. Most tablets have way more memory and much better SIMD than a 360, with a (now) similarly powerful GPU, but with much lower bandwidth. While the end results don't look as good as on a 360 overall, some aspects do indeed look better.

The one huge difference is the input method, which will always hold tablets back.

6ren2• 13 years ago

  It makes a lot of sense to just a build a piece of it first — but that piece needs
  to be representative. You can’t just hack something together.” He calls this
  prototype a “publishable first playable,”

A better explanation of MVP than most.

AnaRizaMae• 13 years ago

good article...

blt• 13 years ago

Unified memory architecture! Should be some cool hybrid cpu/gpu algorithm possibilities. Currently the overhead of copying stuff between the two memories in CUDA prevents any fine-grained cooperation. I wonder how much gpgpu ability is exposed.

jmpeax• 13 years ago

I want to know how much Sony payed Wired for that advertism... article.

fit2rule2• 13 years ago

So I'm clueless as I haven't been paying attention to this market since the PS4/XBox360 were released - does the PS4 not run PS3 titles? If so, does it have some emulation or is it new hardware sitting on top of the old Cell design?

chucknelson3• 13 years ago

Neither PS4 or Xbox One are backwards compatible with their previous generation counterparts. Both of them went x86 this time around with no emulation layer or additional legacy hardware to maintain any sort of backwards compatibility.

A little bit of a bummer, but we'll all forget about it in a year or two :)

robmcm9• 13 years ago

I don't get this desire for backwards compatibility. Why would you want to play a really old game on a shiny new console?

If you really did, then pick up a used ps3 or 360 for about £50 and get the PS4 later!

fit2rule2• 13 years ago

Because maybe I've already got $1000 invested in games I'd like to keep playing?

Well, I understand the clean break was necessary .. since their architecture strategy sort of requires it .. but its still a nuisance that we're confronted with yet more consumerist ideals being marketed as 'features'.

ScottWhigham3• 13 years ago

Says a guy who obviously doesn't have children and who also doesn't own console games :)

I bought my kid the new Lego Batman II for PS3 in March for his birthday. We decided to upgrade to the PS4. He can't play this new game - that was recently released - on the PS4. It's a weird thing to not support backward compatibility IMO. It's a win for the developers/Sony but a loss for consumers. I have to now buy all new games and Lego Star Wars isn't going to be any better on PS4 than on PS3. Your question acts as though there should always be this "evolution" going on but I disagree. I like watching Daffy Duck from the 1940s - I don't like watching the Daffy Duck from the 1980s. Sometimes a game is "really good" and doesn't need revving - it just needs to be made available for the current gen console.

csense• 13 years ago

I wish more people would care about Sony's record.

They initially officially supported Linux on the Playstation 3, but later decided not only to remove the feature from new models, but reach out through the cloud to remove the feature from existing consoles [1] [2].

This is also the company that put rootkits on CD's [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886509

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otheros

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

The American Who Designed the PlayStation 4 and Remade Sony

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