PlayStation 4

Lore & Background

According to lead architect Mark Cerny, the development of Sony's fourth video game console began as early as 2008. Sony worked with software developer Bungie, who offered input on the controller and how to make it better for shooting games. In 2012, Sony began shipping development kits to game developers, consisting of a modified PC running the AMD Accelerated Processing Unit chipset. These development kits were known as 'Orbis'. Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4 at the PlayStation Meeting 2013 in New York City on February 20, 2013. The design of the console was unveiled in June at E3 2013, and the initial recommended retail prices of $399 (NA), €399 (Europe), and £349 (UK) given. The console was released on November 15, 2013, in the United States and Canada, followed by further releases on November 29, 2013. The PS4 was released in Japan at ¥39,980 on February 22, 2014.

In Their Own Story

The room is dark except for the soft blue glow of the console's standby light. A DualShock 4 rests on the coffee table, its touchpad cool to the thumb. On the screen, a character stands at the edge of a rain-soaked city, looking down at a river that reflects neon signs no one is reading. The player pauses. They don't press Share. They don't save. They just watch the rain fall in 60 frames per second, the way it was meant to be seen, and for a moment the room smells like the static hum of a machine that was, for a few years, the only place the world made sense.

Reader's Guide

The PlayStation 4 uses an Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) developed by AMD in cooperation with Sony. It combines a central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU), as well as other components such as a memory controller and video decoder. The CPU consists of two 28 nm quad-core Jaguar modules totaling 8 64-bit x86-64 cores, 7 of which are available for game developers to use. The GPU consists of 18 compute units to produce a theoretical peak performance of 1.84 TFLOPS. The system's GDDR5 memory is capable of running at a maximum clock frequency of 2.75 GHz (5500 MT/s) and has a maximum memory bandwidth of 176 GB/s. The console contains 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, 16 times the amount of RAM found in the PS3. The console's controller was redesigned and improved over the PlayStation 3, with updated buttons and analog sticks, and an integrated touchpad among other changes. The console also supports HDR10 high-dynamic-range video and playback of 4K resolution multimedia.

Did You Know?

• The lead architect of the PlayStation 4 was Mark Cerny, not Shuhei Yoshida.
• The PlayStation 4 development kits were known as 'Orbis'.
• Sony worked with Bungie on the controller design for shooting games.
• The PS4 was the first Sony product released in mainland China after a deal with the Chinese government in May 2014.