PS4 hardware development led by Marble Madness creator

The tidal wave of minutia about thePS4is upon us. As part of Sony's press conference today, the company confirmed that industry veteran Mark Cerny led development on the PlayStation 4's architecture.

Cerny's been in the gaming industry since the late '70s. His first breakout success was the arcade puzzle game Marble Madness. Cerny also collaborated with Naughty Dog in the design of Sony's Crash Bandicoot.

The game developer gave a rundown of what to expect from the PlayStation 4 hardware. He started off by saying that the PlayStation 4 architecture is like a PC, but supercharged. It will contain a highly enhanced PC GPU, the X86, 8 GB of unified memory (RAM), and local storage with an HDD. Also, the PS4 APU combines 8 CPU cores with a GPU with almost 8 teraflops. The system memory will be using a GDDR5, which is typically used in high-performance graphics cards.

During the announcement, Sony also offered an example of the processing ability of the PS4 by showing a million objects being dropped in castle town, fully rendered in real-time using the Havok physics engine.