PlayStation 4 technical specifications
The PlayStation 4 technical specifications describe the various hardware components of the PlayStation 4 home video game console group. Multiple versions of this console have been released since the initial launch of the PlayStation 4, including the PlayStation 4 Slim and the PlayStation 4 Pro. Subsequent versions include changes to the technical specifications of the console.
Versions
The original released 420 GB HDD PS4s had manufacturer serial numbers of the form CUH-10XXA; a minor modification with a different form of Wi-Fi Microstrip antenna was registered in mid 2014 as part numbers CUH-11XXA.In 2015, the CUH-12 series as variants CUH-1215A and CUH-1215B were certified in the US by the FCC. Differences between the CUH-11 and CUH-12 series included a reduction in rated power from 250 W to 230 W, a reduction in weight from 2.8 to 2.5 kg, and physical buttons. The CUH-12xx series are also referred to as the "C chassis" variant of the PS4.
In late June 2015, a 1 TB CUH-11 series machine was announced for European/PAL markets.
The CUH-1200 series was officially announced in June 2015, releasing first in Japan, then worldwide. Changes to the design included a matte black HDD cover replacing the original gloss black version. Other minor changes to the design included mechanical buttons replacing electrostatic touch sensitive ones, and a shorter but brighter LED indicator on the top surface of the console. Internally the CUH-12 series included a number of minor changes, including the change to 8 memory modules of 1 GB.
At a PlayStation official event in New York in September 2016 Sony officially announced a new redesigned PS4, the CUH-2000 series, for sale from 15 Sep at $299, €299, £259, or 29,980 Yen for the base 500 GB model. According to a Sony press release the new model was 16% lighter and used 28% less energy than the CUH-1200 series. A 1 TB model at 34,980 Yen was also announced. At the same event a more powerful variant, named the "PS4 Pro" was also announced, designed for 4K and HDR displays. Earlier PS4 models received HDR support with System Software 4.00.
PlayStation 4 Pro
The upgraded PS4 Pro used a more powerful APU built with a 16 nm FinFET process from TSMC. While the number of logical processor cores was unchanged, its CPU clock speed increased from 1.6 GHz to 2.13 GHz, but with the underlying architecture unchanged. The number of graphics Compute Units on the APU doubled to 36 Graphics Core Next Compute Units, with a clock speed increase to 911 MHz, resulting in a theoretical single precision floating point performance metric of 4.19 TeraFLOPs. Compared to the original PS4 GPU, this is a 2.2775× or 127.75% increase in single precision FLOPs. Improvements in GPU 16-bit variable float calculations derived from the newer AMD Vega architecture result in the PS4 Pro having a theoretical half precision floating point performance of 8.39 TeraFLOPs.Overall unified system memory architecture was improved, with the addition of another 1 GB segment of DDR3 DRAM. The PS4 Pro could use this increase in memory to swap out non-gaming applications that run in the background, like Netflix and Spotify. As a side benefit to this, an additional 512 MB of GDDR5 was available for developers to use for games adding up to 5.5 GB, as opposed to the 5 GB available on base PS4 hardware. GDDR5 memory speed was increased from 5.5 Gbit/s to 6.8 Gbit/s, increasing total memory bandwidth to 217.6 GB/s which correlates to a 23.8% improvement.
Some elements added to the design were derived from AMD's newer Polaris and newer architectures; such new features of the processor included a HEVC video codec supporting up to 4k resolution. Other specification changes included HDMI output being upgraded to HDMI 2.0b standard, with HDCP 2.2 compliance. Wireless networking includes 5 GHz band support using the IEEE 802.11ac standard, and Bluetooth support was upgraded to version 4.0; wired LAN is as the original PS4. The rated power of the original PS4 Pro is 310 W. The decision not to upgrade was predicated primarily on cost.
A limited translucent-case version of the PS4 Pro was released in August 2018, which includes minor hardware updates. This new system, model number CUH-7100, besides offering a larger hard drive, used a quieter fan. It drew power more consistently than the CUH-7000, though it became slightly hotter than the launch system.
A second minor hardware refresh, with model number CUH-7200, was first released in bundles with Red Dead Redemption 2 in November 2018. The newer version, otherwise functionally equivalent to the CUH-7000, has a different power connector, and used a quieter fan, which, according to Digital Foundry, made a "night and day" difference in the noise level, similar to the improvements in the CUH-7100. It drew power consistently at 170 W, whereas the 7000, while rated at 170 W, has brief spikes up to 177 W. However, the newer console fan ran slightly slower and became slightly hotter than the 7000 model to gain this improvement. The CUH-7000 model can achieve a similar noise level to the CUH-7200 model when its CPU's thermal paste is replaced and its heatsink and fan are cleaned. When it is done carefully and correctly, the procedure has low to medium risk and takes between fifteen minutes and two hours depending on one's skill and familiarity with the console.
Processors and memory
The PlayStation 4 uses a semi-custom Accelerated Processing Unit developed by AMD in cooperation with Sony and is manufactured by TSMC on a 28 nm process node. Its APU is a single-chip that combines a central processing unit and graphics processing unit, as well as other components such as a memory controller and video decoder/encoder. The console also includes secondary custom chips that handle tasks associated with downloading, uploading, and social gameplay. These tasks can be handled seamlessly in the background during gameplay or while the system is in rest mode.Though not much is publicly known of the PS4's audio capabilities, the console also contains a dedicated hardware audio module, which can support in-game chat with minimal external resources as well as "a very large number" of MP3 streams for use in in-game audio.
APU
The main APU has a die size of, with GPUs, CPUs and memory controllers on the same die. The 2013 release version APUs contained 20 GCN compute units on die, two of which are thought to be present to provide redundancy to improve manufacturing yield. CPUs plus CPU caches make up approximately 15% of the chip area, and the GPU compute units take up approximately 33% of the die area.Central processing units
The central processing unit consists of two x86-64 quad-core modules for a total of eight cores, which are based on the Jaguar CPU architecture from AMD. Each core has 32 kB L1 instruction and data caches, with one shared 2 MB L2 cache per four-core module. The CPU's base clock speed is said to be 1.6 GHz. That produces a theoretical peak performance of 102.4 SP GFLOPS.Graphics processing unit
GPU specifications:- 1152 stream processors
- 72 texture mapping units
- 32 raster operators
- 18 compute units
- 8 asynchronous compute units
- 1.843 teraFLOPs
Though based on AMD's GCN architecture, there are several known differentiating factors between the PS4's GPU and current-gen PC graphics cards featuring first-gen GCN architecture:
- An additional dedicated 20 GB/s bus that bypasses L1 and L2 GPU cache for direct system memory access, reducing synchronisation challenges when performing fine-grained GPGPU compute tasks.
- L2 cache support for simultaneous graphical and asynchronous compute tasks through the addition of a 'volatile' bit tag, providing control over cache invalidation, and reducing the impact of simultaneous graphical and general purpose compute operations.
- An upgrade from 2 to 64 sources for compute commands, improving compute parallelism and execution priority control. This enables finer-grain control over load-balancing of compute commands enabling superior integration with existing game engines.
Audio processing unit