Digital Foundry: Let's talk about next-gen console. What's your take on the general design in terms of CPU and graphics processing power?
Oles Shishkovstov: We are talking PS4, right? I am very excited about both CPU and GPU. Jaguar is a pretty well-balanced out-of-order core and there are eight of them inside. I always wanted a lot of relatively-low-power cores instead of single super-high-performance one, because it's easier to simply parallelise something instead of changing core-algorithms or chasing every cycle inside critical code segment (not that we don't do that, but very often we can avoid it).
Many beefier cores would be even better, but then we'll be left without a GPU! With regards the graphics core, it's great, simply great. It's a modern-age high-performance compute device with unified memory and multiple compute-contexts. The possibilities of CPU-GPU-CPU communication are endless, we can easily expect games doing, for example, AI pathfinding/route planning executing on GPU to become a common thing.
