Another thing the PlayStation 4 team did to increase the flexibility of the console is to put many of its basic functions on dedicated units on the board -- that way, you don't have to allocate resources to handling these things.
"The reason we use dedicated units is it means the overhead as far as games are concerned is very low," said Cerny. "It also establishes a baseline that we can use in our user experience."
"For example, by having the hardware dedicated unit for audio, that means we can support audio chat without the games needing to dedicate any significant resources to them. The same thing for compression and decompression of video." The audio unit also handles decompression of "a very large number" of MP3 streams for in-game audio, Cerny added.