On March 18th, Sony finally broke cover with in-depth information on the technical make-up of PlayStation 5. Expanding significantly on previously discussed topics and revealing lots of new information on the system’s core specifications, lead system architect Mark Cerny delivered a developer-centric presentation that laid out the core foundations of PlayStation 5: power, bandwidth, speed, and immersion. A couple of days prior to the talk going live, Digital Foundry spoke in depth with Cerny on the topics covered. Some of that discussion informed our initial coverage, but we have more information. A lot more.
But to be clear here, everything in this piece centres on the topics in Cerny’s discussion. There’s much to assimilate here, but what you won’t get are any further revelations about PlayStation 5 strategy – and it’s not for want of asking. In our prior meeting back in 2016, Cerny talked in depth about how Sony was wedded to the concept of the console generation and the hardware revealed certainly attests to that. So is cross-gen development a thing for first-party developers? While stressing again that he’s all in on the concept of console generations (as opposed to PC-style, more gradual innovation) he wasn’t going to talk software strategy, and to be fair, that’s not really his area.
Cerny also delivered PlayStation 4 – which he defined as ‘super-charged PC architecture’ way back in 2013. It was an approach that helped deliver a developer-friendly multi-platform golden age… but is PlayStation 5 a return to the more ‘exotic’ philosophy we saw in prior generation console design? Cerny shared little, except to say that PS5 design is easy for PlayStation 4 developers to get to grips with, but digging deeper into the new system’s capabilities, there are many aspects of the PS5 design that PCs will be hard-pressed to match.
However, in going deeper on the topics covered in his developer presentation, Mark Cerny comes alive. There’s an obvious, genuine passion and enthusiasm for the hardware he has helped to develop – and that’s where you’ll get maximum value in this article. In our online meeting, we cover a range of topics:
PlayStation 5’s innovative boost clock – how does it actually work?What was required from a CPU perspective to deliver backwards compatibility?What are the crucial advantages of the SSD and how are they delivered?How does 3D audio actually work – and just how powerful is the Tempest engine?How does the new 3D audio system interface with TV speakers and 5.1/7.1 surround set-ups?
What follows is undoubtedly deep and on the technical side – a chance to more fully explore some of the topics raised in the presentation. A few times throughout the conversation, Cerny suggested further research, one of the reasons we didn’t (indeed, couldn’t) go live straight away after the event. Needless to say, before going on, I would highly recommend watching Mark’s presentation in its entirety, if you haven’t already. It’s right here.
One of the areas I was particularly interested to talk about was the boost clock of the PlayStation 5 – an innovation that essentially gives the system on chip a set power budget based on the thermal dissipation of the cooling assembly. Interestingly, in his presentation, Mark Cerny acknowledged the difficulties of cooling PlayStation 4 and suggested that having a maximum power budget actually made the job easier. “Because there are no more unknowns, there’s no need to guess what power consumption the worst case game have,” Cerny said in his talk. “As for the details of the cooling solution, we’re saving them for our teardown, I think you’ll be quite happy with what the engineering team came up with.”