The PlayStation 4 Does Use The FreeBSD Kernel, Mono

[werfu]

No, the GDDR5 unified system memory + HSA access make it so that you cannot get a normal PC to perform adequately at PS4 games, at least until a HSA APU with RAM of close enough speed is available commercially. That won't be happening in a year or two, which are the years that make most console sales.

A discrete system simply won't do due to pci-e latency; an APU won't have enough performance with DDR3. So anyone who wants to actually play games would still buy the PS4.

By the time that clones are viable, 3-5 years later, console sales would be small enough for it not to matter to Sony.

APU performance in the next 12-18 months will increase significantly, with GCN 2.0 getting introduced as well as chips getting another die shrink. AMD surely has plan for HUMA over PCIe too. And don't overestimate GDDR5 performance impact. Sure that thing is quick and running the beast on DDR3 instead would surely increase latency and do weird things to games, but most of them would still be playable.

Being on the same architecture could enable us to run the PS4 OS under paravirtualization and simply do some memory address translation using the IOMMU, using the same mechanism used by swapping technique but to instead transfer back and forth to the GPU. That would be hell slow, but it would work.

[curaga]

Console games are usually hardcoded to one resolution, so you cannot drop the res to improve speed. As the majority already runs at 30fps on the target hw, a clone system with DDR3 would do around 10fps. Not what I call playable.

Estimate based on the ~3x bw difference, all else being equal.

[log0]

Console games are usually hardcoded to one resolution, so you cannot drop the res to improve speed. As the majority already runs at 30fps on the target hw, a clone system with DDR3 would do around 10fps. Not what I call playable.

Estimate based on the ~3x bw difference, all else being equal.

I don't think it would be that bad (depending on the game bandwidth requirements). The Xbone is a crippled PS4 with DDR3 + 32MB ESRAM and gets the same games running (with slightly lower resolution hehe).

[Vim_User]

Console games are usually hardcoded to one resolution, so you cannot drop the res to improve speed. As the majority already runs at 30fps on the target hw, a clone system with DDR3 would do around 10fps. Not what I call playable.

Estimate based on the ~3x bw difference, all else being equal.

AFAIK, the PS4 will support 720p and 1080p, so based on the ~3x difference you should be able to play a game that runs smoothly in 1080p in 720p with not such a heavy impact on performance.

[Guest]

No, the only speculative part of my post was that Sony wasn't providing patches back to the community, and according to Michael's other article, they are:

Great, few patches for llvm while Linux would get every change. BSD can only beg and wait. It's such foolish and it's a fact.

[Guest]

Oh, and that they hadn't needed to apply stability/performance patches. But I'd imagine they'd upstream such changes, were they necessary, since it would benefit them in the long run to have those audited and included by upstream--much like they are with LLVM patches. (stupid 5min edit window. >_< )

Yeah, keep dreaming.

[Guest]

That's not correct - they have sent in their patches (AVX patches): http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...ch/013740.html - so FreeBSD benefits already from their patches.

What's not correct? I said they don't have to share their patches. If they sent few lines of code it doesn't matter.

[Nobu]

Happy New Year!

Pawlerson

1: reply in one post--you are capable of this, yes? The only reason I made two posts is because of the edit time expiring, not because I'm incapable of stringing two thoughts together simply because the two sentences I'm replying to are contained within two separate boxes. (Edit: If I did reply to every post like that, I'm sure I'd have well over 600 posts by now. o_O)

2:

[Guest]

Pawlerson

1: reply in one post--you are capable of this, yes? The only reason I made two posts is because of the edit time expiring, not because I'm incapable of stringing two thoughts together simply because the two sentences I'm replying to are contained within two separate boxes. (Edit: If I did reply to every post like that, I'm sure I'd have well over 600 posts by now. o_O)

2:

I think it's better to reply one by one, so there's no such chaos. Don't care about number of posts. It means nothing.

[directhex]

why do they need mono?

https://psm.playstation.net/portal/en/index.html

Plus previously mentioned Unity3D