We've already taken a reasonably detailed deep dive into the PlayStation 4's internals based on Sony's specifications for the console, and we know it looks more like a PC than anything in the current generation of consoles, right down to the eight-core AMD-supplied x86 CPU. In a discussion with Gamasutra, PS4 Lead Architect Mark Cerny emphasized the extent to which these decisions were driven by game software and middleware developers.

"[C]learly we had had some issues with PlayStation 3, in that a very developer-centric approach to the design of the PlayStation 4 would just make things go more smoothly overall," Cerny said, a reference to the PlayStation 3's complicated Cell CPU. The developer outreach process began as early as 2007, when Cerny was put in charge of the new console's hardware, and was done before any work had commenced on the actual hardware design.

"The biggest thing was that we didn't want the hardware to be a puzzle that programmers would be needing to solve to make quality titles," said Cerny. Feedback from developers directly influenced several major specifications that we'll see in the finished console: a large pool of unified memory shared by both the CPU and GPU was a common request, and developers also asked that the hardware use no more than eight CPU cores because "the consensus was that any more than eight, and special techniques would be needed to use them, to get efficiency."

This developer-centric approach is quite a turn-around for Sony; Sony Corporation President Kaz Hirai once infamously said of the PlayStation 3 that Sony didn't aim to "provide the 'easy to program for' console that (developers) want" because the company wanted developers to be able to squeeze more out of the hardware as time went on and their familiarity with it increased. This viewpoint is more difficult to defend in an age of cross-platform games that must be ported to as many platforms as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. In contrast, this cross-platform porting is something that Cerny wanted to account for when designing the new console's hardware.

"It definitely was very helpful to have gone out and have done the outreach before sitting down to design the hardware," he said.