PS4 dev kit reveals juicy hardware details

In a recent FCC filing, Sony’s PS4 dev kits went through a grilling test process, and because the white papers are available to the public, anyone can take a peek at what’s inside and how things work.

According to PS4 architect Mark Cerny, a veteran game developer with a long history of collaborating with Sony, development of the Playstation 3’s successor started in 2008 a year after the PS3’s launch. Sony asked developers what they wanted to see in the next generation of consoles and used that feedback to finally arrive at the final hardware specifications of the Playstation 4.

While the slanted Transformer-like box is what the public will be exposed to, the developer units used to make and test the games are very different in both design and operation.

Sony Playstation 4 developer kit

The chassis has extra vents and ports not found on the shipping console and we can clearly see an extra USB port, a second Ethernet port, auxiliary port, and what looks like Displayport. There’s also a row of eight LED lights on the front of the chassis that are used as a POST debug LED, which helps identify where system hangs are occurring or if there are errors in the boot process.

We can also see that the cooling system in the dev kit is very different from the final hardware specification – there is an 80mm intake fan at the front of the chassis. The actual internal diagrams of the PS4 dev kit, as with the retail version, are going to remain a secret for the next six months.

Along with diagrams of the chassis’ externals, there is also a specification list of the console’s internal operating frequencies. The reasons why devices go through FCC testing is to make sure that they don’t output any harmful radiation and that their magnetic interference isn’t high enough to impact on the operation of other devices.

According to the FCC filing, the developer kit puts out 0.00063 mW/cm² of radio noise, which is very low. A simple microwave puts out at least ten times more radiation.

Sony Playstation 4 developer kit specifications

The specifications according to clock speeds also reveal something interesting – the developer kit hardware is capable of clock speeds up to 2.75GHz for the AMD-based APU. For those of you who don’t know, the PS4’s processor is an AMD APU with eight Jaguar-based cores and a built-in GPU that’s slightly less powerful than a Radeon HD7850.

Its been widely speculated that the Playstation 4’s final hardware will have the processor running at 1.6GHz, so the idea that there’s quite a bit more performance in store that Sony can use in the future thanks to firmware updates is very promising. There’s a single sentence that backs up that assumption a little lower in the table: “This sample is equivalent to mass-produced items.”

In a letter to the FCC, Director of Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, Kiyoto Sasaki, asked that the external and internal photos, test setup and test completion images, as well as the user manual for the Playstation 4 and the dev kit be kept confidential for the next 180 days. The FCC filings were sent in this morning, so these details will be available on 12 January 2014.

Sony has yet to reveal a launch date for their console, but promises that it will be ready “by Holiday 2013.”