It is rare for the big technology giants to put architectures behind electronic products in the spotlight. A recurring exception is system architect Mark Cerny, who has been involved in the development of the Playstation since generation two. There he started by developing a game engine for the game console and since then Playstation 3 he is one of the architects behind the hardware itself.
In a new Youtube video, Mark Cerny steps forward again and tells about the development of Playstation 5. Here, the previous mantra that the hardware has been adapted to the developers’ wishes is repeated, and here he cites Tim Sweeney as an example – founder of Epic Games. One of Sweeney’s wishes was an SSD drive as hard drives, or as he called them “rusty spinning media”, held back the industry.
The most obvious advantage of SSDs is faster charging times from one part of the game to another and that these in interactive scenes do not need to be hidden, something developers have learned to do in ingenious ways. Examples that are mentioned are long elevator journeys, film sequences that cannot be skipped, having to walk slowly through tight spaces or having to take the subway like Spider-Man. During that time, game consoles have traditionally loaded data from the hard drive.
The game console’s system circuit is developed in collaboration with AMD, whose architectures Zen 2 on the CPU side and RDNA 2 on the GPU side lay the foundation. Mark Cerny explains that a powerful graphics part is an important part of a game console, but that the processor cores also play an important role for, among other things, physics and AI. The system circuit in question has 8 cores Zen 2 with support for the multi-wire technology Simultaneous-Multithreading (SMT) for a total of 16 wires.
In passing, he mentions the interesting anecdote that the team behind the system circuit considered implementing as many as 16 cores instead of 8. However, this had led to Sony having to sacrifice the capacity of the graphics part, which is why both themselves and the developers ended up with 8 cores and 16 threads being enough.
In addition to the internal hardware, he also talks about other features related to peripherals such as Tempest 3D Audio and haptic feedback in the game control Dualsense.
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