We analyzed Mark Cerny's presentation looking for the keys to the console's hard drive
A significant part of the conference time given by PS5 chief architect Mark Cerny has gone to detail his vision of how the future solid console (SSD) of the future console is a master stone in the way in which Sony will seek to create new generation worlds. In his explanation he has detailed some of the obvious points for which this disc will have an impact on our experience with the machine, which will be familiar to all who have a PC with one of these discs: almost instantaneous loads of the games, immediacy to the time to update them after a patch, quick boot …
But Cerny and her team's vision goes beyond putting a solid disk drive in the equation already. The entire memory architecture of the console is intended to bring about a fundamental change in the way developers create their worlds, and the way players experience it. The great objective is that memory access does not condition when shaping the environment.
Current design to accommodate two nearby locations
More than just ending the burdens
The example offered is an old acquaintance of the contemporary video game, especially in open worlds: two nearby locations, each with a large load of polygons, textures, NPCs … To go from one place to another, we will invariably have to go through some point intermediate hall type, elevator (we are looking at you, Mass Effect) or any other closed and relatively limited environment. That's because while our character is walking, the part we came from is being discarded in memory, and the part we are going to is being loaded, a technique known as streaming. It is not possible to have these two locations in quick memory if we want them to be spectacular, different and take advantage of all the possibilities of the machine, but what Sony wants is for this process to be so fast that there is no need to disguise it.
This involves more than just swapping out a normal hard drive for a solid one and that's it, that would still have bottlenecks and force the costumes mentioned above, albeit in less time. The solution detailed by Cerny goes through a system in which the processor and memory are in perfect harmony. The first keys is that the hard drive is not of a common capacity, those 825gb of SSD are there to achieve maximum optimization with the 12 channels that constitute the data highway, also directed by a PCI Express 4.0 four-track controller, a On-demand solution designed by and for the specific needs of the console and achieving the goal of a bandwidth of 5.5 Gb per second. The current bandwidth of a PS4 is 50-100 mb per second, so the difference is colossal, on the order of 100 times greater.
Comparison of memory bandwidth between PS4 and PS5
The process to get rid of all those bottlenecks is complex and has more pieces than what we have mentioned here (such as the input / output system, data mapping, consistency, the adoption of the Kraken compression system …) but the objective is clear. The ideal pursued is that games be able to "build" and "destroy" the world around us, instantly. What was previously camouflaged on loading screens or intersection sections, now will not require any camouflage, which should have dramatic consequences when creating all kinds of games: open world games will be less empty, urban environments They may be much more complex and rich, the way we move in the game will have numerous new alternatives … all in theory.
The bottlenecks between processors and memory are traditionally one of the great workhorses of the hardware dedicated to videogames (and in general within computing), be it consoles or PCs. Cerny commented in his talk that the SSD was the first request that developers around the world asked for in their interviews facing PS5 and he has sought to go a step beyond that. Over time we will know if this design is as revolutionary as it has been sold, and if we will notice that difference when we are in front of the first exclusive games of the next generation.
100 times faster bandwidth with custom PS5 architecture
