The lead architect of the PS4, Mark Cerny, has revealed some important details about the dedicated audio processing chip inside the console.

“There’s dedicated audio hardware,” he revealed. “The principal thing that it does is that it compresses and decompresses audio streams, various formats. So some of that is for the games – you’ll have many, many audio streams in MP3 or another format and the hardware will take care of that for you.

“Or, on the system side for example, audio chat – the compression and decompression of that.”

He also added that the GPU can be useful to do different types of audio processing.

“It really does come down though to the amount of parallelisation that is natural to perform for that algorithm, and that does vary greatly depending on what you are doing specifically in your audio processing. I think that as you go forward we will see a hybrid approach in a couple of years where certain aspects of the audio are being done on GPU.”

Earlier he revealed that PS4 GDDR5 RAM latency was not much of a factor since the GPU could handle it.

Via Digital Foundry.