Mark Cerny, lead designer for the PlayStation 4 at Sony, explained to Gamasutra that the new system was built based on developer feedback. Back at the PlayStation 4 controller and system spec unveiling in February, Cerny referred to the upcoming system as having a “supercharged PC architecture”. Expounding on that idea, Cerny said the main “supercharged” description refers to the single unified pool of high-speed memory.
So far the fact that the PlayStation 4 will have 8 GB of GDDR5 unified memory is no surprise and Cerny made sure to point out that it was the “largest piece” of feedback they collected from interested developers. Cerny said the unified architecture will be very beneficial for coding from the starting gate to the finish line. He said this is mainly due to an AMD-designed custom chip which houses both the PlayStation 4’s GPU and CPU.
Cerny said that even though the PS3’s processor was powerful, developers still had to take it apart and study it to figure out how to use the hardware in cool new ways. That, however, is not the case with the PlayStation 4 as Cerny explained, “The hope with PlayStation 4 was to have a powerful architecture, but also an architecture that would be a very familiar architecture in many ways.”