Speaking to Polygon at the PlayStation 4 review event in New York, Cerny said: “PlayStation 2 went very well. I mean we were … our market share was 75% maybe, and then PlayStation 3 really hit a rough patch and a lot of that had to do with – on the consumer side – of the console being so expensive. So we had this goal with PlayStation 4 that we’d be a much more affordable console than PlayStation 3.

“But on the developer side, PlayStation 3 had a reputation for being very hard to work with. I mean I knew that, I worked on a launch title, and so we wanted to make sure that PlayStation 4 would be smooth sailing, that it would be the sort of thing where you wouldn’t have to learn every detail of the hardware, in order to make a game. That it could be much more about the vision of the director of the title.”

When asked if shifting to a common architecture to PC would take some of Sony’s power away, Cerny replied, “PlayStation 4 is the most powerful video game console ever created, so I think we’ve managed to find that middle ground between the power and that accessibility.”

Cerny also teased a “tremendous evolution” in PlayStation 4 during the upcoming generation of gaming.

“We want to make sure that consumers have an opportunity to buy one on November 15 and through the holidays,” Tretton said, “so we’re holding back some inventory to make sure that people have an opportunity to buy one that come in on launch day.”

“But we can pre-sell every unit we can manufacture and the good news, production yields have been phenomenal, so this will be by a magnitude of a lot the biggest launch we’ve ever had.”

Good news. Let’s hope that everyone who wants a PS4 this holiday season is able to find the hotly anticipated machine.

Well today, Penello was caught red-handed by knowledgeable people on the popular gaming forum, turning the situation into a monumental mess for Microsoft and its Xbox One.

Here’s Penello’s post about the power difference between PS4 and Xbox One:

I see my statements the other day caused more of a stir than I had intended. I saw threads locking down as fast as they pop up, so I apologize for the delayed response.

I was hoping my comments would lead the discussion to be more about the games (and the fact that games on both systems look great) as a sign of my point about performance, but unfortunately I saw more discussion of my credibility.

So I thought I would add more detail to what I said the other day, that perhaps people can debate those individual merits instead of making personal attacks. This should hopefully dismiss the notion I’m simply creating FUD or spin.

I do want to be super clear: I’m not disparaging Sony. I’m not trying to diminish them, or their launch or what they have said. But I do need to draw comparisons since I am trying to explain that the way people are calculating the differences between the two machines isn’t completely accurate. I think I’ve been upfront I have nothing but respect for those guys, but I’m not a fan of the mis-information about our performance.

So, here are couple of points about some of the individual parts for people to consider:

• 18 CU’s vs. 12 CU’s =/= 50% more performance. Multi-core processors have inherent inefficiency with more CU’s, so it’s simply incorrect to say 50% more GPU.
• Adding to that, each of our CU’s is running 6% faster. It’s not simply a 6% clock speed increase overall.
• We have more memory bandwidth. 176gb/sec is peak on paper for GDDR5. Our peak on paper is 272gb/sec. (68gb/sec DDR3 + 204gb/sec on ESRAM). ESRAM can do read/write cycles simultaneously so I see this number mis-quoted.
• We have at least 10% more CPU. Not only a faster processor, but a better audio chip also offloading CPU cycles.
• We understand GPGPU and its importance very well. Microsoft invented Direct Compute, and have been using GPGPU in a shipping product since 2010 – it’s called Kinect.
• Speaking of GPGPU – we have 3X the coherent bandwidth for GPGPU at 30gb/sec which significantly improves our ability for the CPU to efficiently read data generated by the GPU.

Hopefully with some of those more specific points people will understand where we have reduced bottlenecks in the system. I’m sure this will get debated endlessly but at least you can see I’m backing up my points.

I still I believe that we get little credit for the fact that, as a SW company, the people designing our system are some of the smartest graphics engineers around – they understand how to architect and balance a system for graphics performance. Each company has their strengths, and I feel that our strength is overlooked when evaluating both boxes.

Given this continued belief of a significant gap, we’re working with our most senior graphics and silicon engineers to get into more depth on this topic. They will be more credible then I am, and can talk in detail about some of the benchmarking we’ve done and how we balanced our system.

Thanks again for letting my participate. Hope this gives people more background on my claims.

Immediately, knowledgeable people realized that Penello was just being a regular PR mouthpiece for Microsoft, using NeoGAF as his platform. Here are some of the responses he got:

→ I do not mean to offend when I ask this but who typed up this nonsense for you. 272gb/s peak on paper. What rubbish is this? I study computer science for a living and this is garbage. Creative engineering and fud at its best. You do not have anywhere close to a 272gb/s peak at all. It’s one thing to beat around the Bush but it’s another to straight up lie. The fact that esram can only move 32mb at the previously reported 194gb/s peak should point to the kind of nonsense you are spreading. The majority of the data on the ram can only move at 68gb/s. I’m not even going to bother with the other nonsense in this post. It’s truly embarrassing that you can come up here and type this nonsense. You do not just add up bandwidth numbers like that. Shameful.

→ Really love to have one of your “tech guy” explain how esram reads & writes at the same time.

Gpu have a lot more than just CU. PS4 have 100% advantage in other key areas on the GPU that you did not even talk about.

→ I really don’t want to be disrespectful. And just to prevent unproductive ad hominems from others about being an engineer and not being an engineer, I am an engineer, but this statement of yours really does not make any sense at all.

→ This is insulting. And I am not even a tech guru. You don’t just add bandwidth as ESRAM is not all of 8GB.

→ I don’t understand how these two statements are logically consistent.

By the distributive property:

(X + X + … + X) * 1.06 = 1.06*X + 1.06*X + … + 1.06*X.

And that’s assuming the CUs work linearly.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, you said the exact opposite — having additional CUs does not result in a linear increase in power.

Therefore, your statement is actually THE OPPOSITE of what you are pointing out:

(X + X + … + X) * 1.06 > 1.06*X + 1.06*X + … + 1.06*X.

But then, by your very own logic, having each CU running 6% faster is actually **worse** than a 6% increase overall.

→ I know you think you gain something by coming on here and giving us the PR message but a lot of us know a little about what we are talking about here. Putting the “peak bw” nonsense just rubs me the wrong way.

→ Enough… Seriously man, just stop this. It looks no better when you comment on how “we don’t know the full story from MS’ side” when the exact same thing can very well be said about your perspective on Sony’s hardware and engineering. And again, you comment on this with an extremely obvious bias in the discussion. I don’t think it’s beneficial for you to participate in these discussions; again, I feel like it’s going to do more damage to people’s perspective of your (and other MS representatives’) participation on these forums when you come in here and start engaging in hardware comparisons with your direct competition.

→ So, didn’t you earlier state you don’t know what Sony are doing with their console but now you know their unannounced CPU clocks?

→ That’s odd because the PS4 does not have 10gb/sec bandwidth, I believe you are making a mistake regarding onion, onion+ and onion(+) buses.

→ You’re only speaking on one side… yet you keep bringing up the point as if the hardware in Sony’s PS4 is just that, with nothing else to it.

→ I’m very disappointed in this magic math right there. I hope the upcoming post by your graphics people is a bit more honest with the real world numbers.
(I don’t think saying “on paper” is a get-out-of-jail-free card.)

→ So much wrong with that post.

Graphics are a embarrassing parallel load, that means you have very little scaling hit.
You do not address the massive ROP difference, which will make it even faster than just having more CUs alone.

I do not see anything that points to it not being just a simple clockspeed increase.

→ You can not add up the bandwidth like that!
The PS4 can do its peak bandwidth across all 8GB vs a system that only has 68GB/S from it’s main RAM and the majorly of it’s bandwidth comes from a tiny (32MB) pool of SRAM!

These are just some of the gamers and tech people on NeoGAF who called out Penello, and there are countless more.

My Take:

I don’t think Microsoft should be talking about PS4′s specs when it has no knowledge of what Sony’s doing outside of what the public knows… Especially when Microsoft itself is saying Sony, nor the public truly knows how Xbox One specs work. Furthermore, going to NeoGAF and trying to disparage your competitor’s console, one that is so obviously more powerful and better built than yours, is a recipe for disaster. But that’s been the Xbox One’s story all along, hasn’t it?

Microsoft has been trying its best to get Xbox One on the right path, and in recent times they’ve somewhat succeeded in doing just that. However recent moves by the firm’s executives haven’t played out so well.

That’s all fine and dandy, but Penello took a different route on popular gaming forum NeoGAF, by trying his best in numerous posts to downplay PS4′s raw advantage over Xbox One, taking shots at Sony for comments the firm made spanning way back to PS2 days, and claiming that there’s no way Microsoft would allow Sony and its PS4 to get away with a 30-40 percent power advantage over Xbox One.

He even seemed to insinuate that NeoGAF members were dumb, claiming that Microsoft has some of the best coders and engineers in the world, and bragging that Microsoft created DirectX, so obviously they know what they’re about.

The company was doing well in recent days – not weeks, days. But today, Penello went full-mental on us, and Xbox One isn’t even out of the woods yet – far from it, in fact.

Here’s Penello: “People DO understand that Microsoft has some of the smartest graphics programmers IN THE WORLD. We CREATED DirectX, the standard API’s that everyone programs against. So while people laude Sony for their [hardware] skills, do you really think we don’t know how to build a system optimized for maximizing graphics for programmers? Seriously? There is no way we’re giving up a 30%+ advantage to Sony. And ANYONE who has seen both systems running could say there are great looking games on both systems. If there was really huge performance difference – it would be obvious.”

He raged on: “I’m not saying they haven’t built a good system – I’m merely saying that anyone who wants to die on their sword over this 30%+ power advantage are going to be fighting an uphill battle over the next 10 years…”

Penello went on to question Sony’s strategy — as if Mark Cerny hasn’t been forthright with PS4′s innards, and as if he, Penello, has been in a cave from February until now. Sony’s clearly been open about PS4, and have, in many settings, painstakingly described the console’s architecture — yet Penello ignores all this, ignores PS4′s raw power advantage, and states there won’t be much of a difference once the consoles and games for them are released.

But it’s total PR talk, and about questioning Sony’s PS4 strategy, he said: “I’m stating that not everyone knows all the facts. There are still a lot of important details about the platforms that are still unknown. I have many, many questions about what Sony is doing technically.”

Questions? About what, Penello?

“The question I posed earlier, and the statements I’m making now, will come out when we see the actual shipping boxes.

“The most obvious point is that anyone looking at games on both platforms do not see ANY difference, let alone this alleged 30% – 40%. Both systems are powerful. Both are capable of next-gen graphics. I’m merely saying the application of that performance will mean the actual difference will not be that great.”

I’m not sure why Penello had to go there, as I think they’ve been doing a decent job getting a positive Xbox One message across as stated earlier, but they’ve shown themselves, once again, to be arrogant — the very same attitude that almost cost the company Xbox One.

Hopefully they get back on message soon.

It was in an interview with TechRadar that Gara divulged this info, adding that although they’re ahead in numbers now, they plan to keep their heads down and race to the finish, recognizing that the console generation game isn’t a sprint.

The thing I’m most pleased about is the entire design principles about the PS4 are being focused around the gamer first. So how can we create a platform that’s great to develop for and easy to develop for, because that unleashes the creatives and if they can create the best experiences that’s going to lead to satisfaction for gamers.

But secondly to design a piece of technology like that it’s very easy to deliver one or the other, in particular I’m talking about the price and the performance trade off. It’s very hard to deliver both and for me the balance that’s been delivered across those two is outstanding. So it’s great to be going to market with what we believe is the most powerful gaming device ever conceived and certainly ever developed and at a price that feels very acceptable, certainly based on the pre-order volumes that we’re seeing.

We have the most uncompromised memory spec that we could pretty well dream up and if you talk to developers, if you talk to first party, third party developers, you’ll see that that opens up the possibilities for them and it’s about as high spec as they could have ever imagined, 8GB gives them huge headroom to continue developing fantastic games.

PS4 launches holiday season 2013. There’s a rumor claiming that an exact launch date will be revealed at GamesCom in Cologne, Germany this August. We’ll keep you posted.

“I appreciate those who understand the point I was trying to get across. It’s always hard, after sitting doing interviews all day, and you’re trying to have an engaging conversation with someone, and words get pulled out our the tone what you’re trying to say didn’t come out how you meant it,” he said.

“You should also understand this interview was done after our launch event, and prior to E3. So please take that into consideration.

I’m not diminishing Sony’s performance claims and I wasn’t trying to be arrogant or dismissive. What I was trying to say is – I’m not Sony’s engineering team. So I can’t comment on what they have published as specs. I know what our teams are doing, and I know how they thought about architecting the system. The guys who are building these machines (on both sides) are unbelievably talented and experts in their field. Nobody knows the specifics of how the machines are architected or if there may be bottlenecks in one system or accelerators in another that change the impact of the published specs.”

Problem with what Penello just said is, Sony has done the exact opposite of what he’s stating. Sony has detailed PS4′s innards very clearly, and Mark Cerny went into further detail at the Gamelab event in Barcelona. So to say “nobody knows the specifics” sounds to be like trying to place Sony in the same boat with Microsoft on the issue, when that’s clearly not the case.

That’s according to Microsoft Xbox executive Albert Penello, speaking to OXM in a recent interview. He said in some ways, boasting about console hardware specs “is meaningless”, and went on to blame Sony for talking about PS4′s innards.

“The problem is that Sony decided to go and and publish a bunch of numbers,” which isn’t why customers buy new consoles,” he said.

Players want “to play great games and have great experiences. I feel like our games and experiences are going to be every bit as good, if not better, technically,” he added.

He wasn’t done with Sony, however, saying about the company: “As a matter of fact, they actually go out and they talk about how proud they are about their off-the-shelf parts.”

About Microsoft, he said: “Our guys’ll say, we touched every single component in the box and everything there is tweaked for optimum performance.”

So the discussion about which console is more technically capable “isn’t going to matter”, Penello reckoned, adding that, “it’s a pointless argument because people are debating things which they don’t know about.”

Do you agree?

This past week most of the talk was about PS4 specs and how it’s more powerful than that of Xbox One, then suddenly, per Eurogamer, Microsoft made a claim that it’s magically found a way to make Xbox One’s ESRAM more efficient, and is able to extract, get this, 88 percent more power from the console.

That’s one day after Mark Cerny’s Gamelab keynote in Barcelona, where he spoke about the innards of PS4, eluding to why it’s so much more powerful than anything on the market, and easier to create games for, too.

Eurogamer was found wanting, however, mistakenly revealing its “sources” of this information as, wait for it… Microsoft!

Anyway, it’s all a show, Xbox One is way less powerful than PS4 and Microsoft, with bad habits, is looking to change the perception that it is… But whatever.

The question is, how important is a console’s specs to you? Does it matter which is the most powerful? Because the Wii, being the least powerful during its time, is still the bestselling console of current-gen.

It matters to me, but that’s just me.

Also, what games are you good people playing or have played this weekend? Let’s hear it! And have a blessed one!

“Involving the third-parties was tricky,” said Cerny. “We definitely wanted their input on the design but we felt that it would be a bad idea to go to the teams who are making the top PlayStation 3 titles in 2008 and 2009 and start briefing them on a system that wouldn’t be released for many years.”

“It just felt like a tremendous distraction,” he added.

So they went out seeking ideas from the third-parties, “and the answers were predictable,” said Cerny. “Basically the teams said that if we can afford to give them 1,000 times the performance of the PS3 then go ahead, do it.

But, more importantly, we asked about the flavour of those systems that they would like to see in next-generation games console and the ratios that they would like to see between the various components. Should we put more money into the CPU or the GPU, or somewhere else?”

Cerny also said that third-parties “weren’t fooled for a minute by the abstract nature of the questionnaire. Everyone we sat down with knew that we were asking for feedback on the design of the PS4.”

Official Playstation 4 Specs

• Product code CUH-1000A series
• Recommended retail price $399/€ 399/£349

MAIN PROCESSOR:

• Single-chip custom processor
• CPU : x86-64 AMD “Jaguar”, eight cores
• GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine

• Memory GDDR5 8GB
• Storage size 500GB Hard Disk drive
• External dimensions Approx. 275×53×305 mm (width × height × length)
• Mass Approx. 2.8 kg
• BD/ DVD drive (read only): BD × 6 CAV, DVD × 8 CAV

INPUT/ OUTPUT:

• Super-Speed USBx (USB 3.0) port × 2
• AUX port × 1

NETWORKING:

• Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) ×1
• IEEE 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth® 2.1 (EDR)

AV OUTPUT:

• HDMI out port
• DIGITAL OUT (OPTICAL) port

INCLUDED:

• PlayStation 4 system × 1
• Wireless Controller (DUALSHOCK 4) × 1
• Mono headset × 1
• AC power cord × 1

See that GDDR5 bit? Yeah, monstrosity, this. Also, Sony confirmed via twitter that the machine’s region free, and it’s HDD is upgradeable. What more could a core gamer ask for?

Through a process of extrapolation from the drip-feed of hard facts, the make-up of the One’s GPU is confirmed – 12 compute units each capable of 64 ops/clock gives us the 768 total revealed by Microsoft and thus, by extension, the 1.2 teraflop graphics core.

So that’s another tick on the Durango leaked spec that has been transposed across to the final Xbox One architecture and the proof we need that PlayStation 4′s 18 CU graphics core has 50 per cent more raw power than the GPU in the new Microsoft console.

But that’s not all. Microsoft also went with GDDR3 RAM where Sony chose GDDR5, the latter being a much faster and efficient tech than the former. Thing is, Microsoft, because of its unflinching focus on TV and other multimedia offerings for Xbox One, had to secure RAM at an early stage of the console’s development, while Sony on the other hand could chase a moving target.

Here’s how DF puts it:

The answer to that comes down to a specific gamble Sony made that Microsoft could not – the utilisation of a unified pool of GDDR5 memory. In the early days of PS4 development, only 2GB of this type of memory looked viable for a consumer-level device. As higher density modules became available, this was duly upgraded to 4GB. By the time of the reveal back in February, Sony had confidence that it could secure volume of 512MB modules and surprised everyone (even developers) by announcing that PS4 would ship with 8GB of unified GDDR5 RAM. The design of its surrounding architecture would not need to change throughout this process – one set of 16 GDDR5 chips would simply be swapped out for another.

Microsoft never had the luxury of this moving target. With multimedia such a core focus for its hardware, it set out to support 8GB of RAM from day one (at the time giving it a huge advantage over the early PS4 target RAM spec) and with serious volume of next-gen DDR4 unattainable in the time window, it zeroed in on supporting DDR3 and doing whatever was necessary to make that work on a console. The result is a complex architecture – 32MB of ESRAM is added to the processor die, along with “data move engines” to courier information around the system as quickly as possible with bespoke encode/decode hardware to alleviate common bottlenecks. Bottom line: if you’re wondering why Xbox One has a weaker GPU than PlayStation 4, it’s because both platform holders have similar silicon budgets for the main processor – Sony has used the die-space for additional compute units and ROPs (32 vs. 16 in One), while Microsoft has budgeted for ESRAM and data move engines instead. From the Xbox perspective, it’s just unfortunate for Microsoft that Sony’s gamble paid off – right up until the wire, it was confident of shipping with twice the amount of RAM as PlayStation 4.

So PS4 is now way more powerful than Xbox One and that, it seems, is final.

Source: Digital Foundry.

Ubisoft believes people everywhere want to express themselves in increasingly unique ways, and games should be an avenue by which said expressions are relayed. Current gen consoles don’t have the prowess for such expansion, and it’s one of the reasons why the new systems need to be released sooner rather than later.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said all this in a prepared statement today, courtesy Gamespot:

We live in a world of self-expression. Everywhere, everyone is creative and wants to add value. Customization, or curating, is a huge growth area across all services and that holds true for games. People want to play in their own way, they want to define their own experience and they want to share the way they’re playing.

So do you agree? Are you starved for a PS4 or the next Xbox? Let’s talk. Do it here: The Official Games Thirst GDDR5.

Said Evolution technical director Scott Kirkland when asked about PS4′s specs:

With it being a very contemporary GPU core, [there's] a whole bunch of new graphics features probably familiar to PC developers, but we’ve spent a lot of time in PS3 land, so we had to play catch-up on some of those great things like texture varieties, hardware instancing, volume textures, tessellation, texture compression.

They’re all really cool features that we’re leveraging in all sorts of interesting ways.

He went on, making known that his very pleased with the consoles capabilities.

The CPU part of things, having that asymmetrical architecture, that made it really easy for us to gain great performance from the outset.

The Play-Go initiative, which Mark Cerny [PS4 lead architect] spoke about, those are discussions we’ve been heavily involved in. Combined with the Blu-ray disc for physical delivery, the hard drive is going to allow us to deliver awesome experiences to players in a fraction of the load times and download times that players experienced on PS3 and [360]. So we’re really excited about that. We think it’ll be a real differentiator.

Evolution Studios’ DriveClub is expected to be a PS4 title.

Speaking to Edge recently, Blow said he was extremely impressed with the console’s power and the ease of development as compared to any other platform, most notably the PC.

For The Witness we’re mostly interested in the base machine and how fast it is – the fact it has faster RAM than a PC, which really helps in shuttling graphics resources around, and since it’s not running a heavyweight operating system like Windows that gets in the way of your graphics. Rendering stuff through Windows has an impact on performance. Since a console is just about games, that doesn’t happen, and the equivalent game will run faster. And if you can target to specific hardware you can make it run faster, too.

In regards to the PS4′s share button, he said:

In general, as a platform feature, it’s super interesting. One thing that most game developers have become really aware of is that over the past couple of years on YouTube the whole livecast and commentary thing is really huge.

A lot of people are paying a lot of attention to it now and it’s interesting to see what happens if you base an entire console around it. That’s what’s crazy about PS4 – it has a chip that’s always recording to a maybe two-minute buffer. After something cool happens, it’s there in the buffer. That’s the sort of thing that’s really going to change the way something’s used.

Blow’s new game, The Witness, is a timed-PS4 exclusive. However he’s not sure whether the game will be released on Microsoft’s next console, as his working relationship with said company has been hazy at best.