GameTavern - PlayStation 4/Orbis Rumor Round-up

All fingers seem to point to Sony revealing the PlayStation 4/Orbis on Feb 20th, here are a few of the details/specs that have leaked out about the console over the past few weeks.

The controller

Sources close to the hardware have revealed to us that PS4 will ship with a redesigned controller which is the same size as an existing DualShock but features a small touchpad in place of the existing Select, Start and PS buttons. The tech is based on Vita’s rear touchpad, and is similarly responsive in use.

A new Share button on the controller will, when pressed, launch a new feature that will allow screenshots and video to be distributed online. The PS4 hardware will continually record the most recent 15 minutes of onscreen action (with no processing penalty, claims our source), which users will then be able to edit and broadcast via the Internet.

The Specs

LIVERPOOL SOC

Custom implementation of AMD Fusion APU Arquitecture (Accelerated Processing Unit)
Provides good performance with low power consumtion
Integrated CPU and GPU
Considerably bigger and more powerful than AMD’s other APUs

PU:

Orbis contains eight Jaguar cores at 1.6 Ghz, arranged as two “clusters”
Each cluster contains 4 cores and a shared 2MB L2 cache
256-bit SIMD operations, 128-bit SIMD ALU
SSE up to SSE4, as well as Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)
One hardware thread per core
Decodes, executes and retires at up to two intructions/cycle
Out of order execution
Per-core dedicated L1-I and L1-D cache (32Kb each)
Two pipes per core yield 12,8 GFlops performance
102.4 GFlops for system

GPU:

GPU is based on AMD’s “R10XX” (Southern Islands) architecture
DirectX 11.1+ feature set
Liverpool is an enhanced version of the architecture
18 Compute Units (CUs)
Hardware balanced at 14 CUs
Shared 512 KB of read/write L2 cache
800 Mhz
1.843 Tflops, 922 GigaOps/s
Dual shader engines
18 texture units
8 Render backends

UPDATE: some people is confused about the GPU, here you have more info about it:

Each CU contains dedicated:

- ALU (32 64-bit operations per cycle)

- Texture Unit

- L1 data cache

- Local data share (LDS)

About 14 + 4 balance:

- 4 additional CUs (410 Gflops) “extra” ALU as resource for compute

- Minor boost if used for rendering

Dual Shader Engines:

- 1.6 billion triangles/s, 1.6 billion vertices/s

18 Texture units

- 56 billion bilinear texture reads/s

- Can utilize full memory bandwith

8 Render backends:

- 32 color ops/cycle

- 128 depth ops/cycle

- Can utilize full memory bandwith

Memory:

4 GB unified system memory, 176 GB/s
3.5 available to games (estimate)

Storage:

- High speed Blu-ray drive

single layer (25 GB) or dual layer (50 GB) discs
Partial constant angular velocity (PCAV)
Outer half of disc 6x (27 MB/s)
Inner half varies, 3.3x to 6x

- Internal mass storage

One SKU at launch: 500 GB HDD
There may also be a Flash drive SKU in the future

Networking:

1 Gb/s Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WIFI, and Bluetooth

Peripherals:

Evolved Dualshock controller
Dual Camera
Move controller

Extra:

Audio Processor (ACP)
Video encode and decode (VCE/UVD) units
Display ScanOut Engine (DCE)
Zlib Decompression Hardware