Nvidia is bitter about PlayStation 4, says AMD

At the recently-concluded Game Developers Conference, we got a bunch of details on Sony’s next-gen console, the PlayStation 4. According to TechRadar, AMD took the spotlight for its upcoming technology, and the company’s Director of ISV Neal Robinson shed some light on its chips powering the console.

“You don’t know how long we’ve been waiting for that Sony announcement, because we’ve been working on it for years,” Robison told TechRadar. “To finally be able to talk about a culmination of all this effort is really rewarding.”

When asked about Nvidia’s Tony Tamasi’s statement back in March, which stated that the PlayStation 4’s speccs were comparable to a low-end CPU, Robinson said, “Well, of course they’re going to do that. They’re a little bitter.”

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AMD gave Sony the hardware Nvidia couldn’t

He continued, “For us, really by looking at that APU that we designed, you can’t pull out individual components off it and hold it up and say, ‘Yeah, this compares to X or Y’.”

“It’s that integration of the two, and especially with the amount of shared memory [8GB of GDDR5, 176GB/s raw memory bandwidth] that Sony has chosen to put on that machine, then you’re going to be able to do so much more moving and sharing that data that you can address by both sides. It’s more than just a CPU doing all these amazing calculations and a GPU doing calculations. We are now going to be able to move certain tasks between the two.”

“Compared to gaming PCs, the PS4 specs are in the neighborhood of a low-end CPU, and a low- to mid-range GPU side,” said Tony Tamasi back in March. “If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago.”

It doesn’t help that consoles, by design, are meant to not be upgraded to the latest and greatest hardware. This prevents them from ever bridging the gap between them and PCs. “What you get today in terms of performance is what you’re stuck with five - 10 years down the road. PCs don’t have these problems,” said Tamasi. “They are open and can be upgraded at any time to harness the power of newer GPUs for more performance and to take advantage of newer, modern graphics technologies.”

Sony earlier confirmed that an AMD-based x86 processor and a GPU on par with the Radeon HD 7850 would be powering the console. It will have 8GB of unified high-speed memory and a “massive” hard drive. The new controller—dubbed the DualShock 4—will have a touch pad, a share button, a headphone jack and a light bar to identify players. The light bar also works much like the Move sensor through a 3D camera.