Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for the PS4, said he wanted a developer-centric approach to the design of the system. After polling developers starting in 2008 on what they wanted, he got responses on unified memory and the use either 4 or 8 CPU cores.
“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, adding, “When I started talking to the development community, prominent middleware companies were in the mix at that time. It’s very important to us to have those engines on our platform. I have to say, also, the insights that you can get by talking to their top technology people — It’s quite nice to have those insights when doing the hardware design.”
Source: Gamasutra
