On March 18th, Sony finally broke cover with in-depth information on the technical make-up of PlayStation 5. Expanding significantly on previously discussed topics and revealing lots of new information on the system's core specifications, lead system architect Mark Cerny delivered a developer-centric presentation that laid out the core foundations of PlayStation 5: power, bandwidth, speed, and immersion. A couple of days prior to the talk going live, Digital Foundry spoke in depth with Cerny on the topics covered. Some of that discussion informed our initial coverage, but we have more information. A lot more.
But to be clear here, everything in this piece centres on the topics in Cerny's discussion. There's much to assimilate here, but what you won't get are any further revelations about PlayStation 5 strategy - and it's not for want of asking. In our prior meeting back in 2016, Cerny talked in depth about how Sony was wedded to the concept of the console generation and the hardware revealed certainly attests to that. So is cross-gen development a thing for first-party developers? While stressing again that he's all in on the concept of console generations (as opposed to PC-style, more gradual innovation) he wasn't going to talk software strategy, and to be fair, that's not really his area.
Cerny also delivered PlayStation 4 - which he defined as 'super-charged PC architecture' way back in 2013. It was an approach that helped deliver a developer-friendly multi-platform golden age... but is PlayStation 5 a return to the more 'exotic' philosophy we saw in prior generation console design? Cerny shared little, except to say that PS5 design is easy for PlayStation 4 developers to get to grips with, but digging deeper into the new system's capabilities, there are many aspects of the PS5 design that PCs will be hard-pressed to match.