PS4s don't run games from discs. They only use them for installation and authentication purposes.

I believe 4.4.x is an LTS version and those are supported much longer than regular versions.

They claim that they removed the Mali GPU from the SoC in order to be 100% free. Is that even possible? Did they get AllWinner to make them a special chip without the GPU? And how are the graphics handled if there is no GPU?

How so? That card is more expensive than the RX480.

I don't think calling it next gen OpenGL is right either. It has nothing in common with OpenGL except for being developed by the Khronos group.

It's an open specification. It means it is (or will be, in this case) available freely for anyone to implement. It doesn't mean that it is developed publicly.

I wouldn't say the full GPU specs are available. Only the QPUs and some bits and pieces around them have been documented. The VPU, which runs the OpenGL driver and does video decoding among other things, is still closed.

It was also available for free on PS4 for a month or so.

Vulkan hasn't yet released.

The Iris Pro 6200 parts beating AMD's APUs here cost at least twice as much for just the processor.

That's a myth. The only time Sony has used anything related to OpenGL in their consoles is early in the PS3 cycle when they had a custom blend of OpenGL ES with Nvidia's Cg shaders. Pretty much no game developer bother with it because it was very slow compared to Sony's proprietary low-level API.

That hasn't been my experience on PS4. I can usually start playing a new game within 20 seconds or so of putting the disc in for the first time.

It's less of a problem on PS4 because games only take a few seconds to install enough for you to start playing while the rest of the game is being installed in the background. I understand on the Xbox One it takes minutes for that initial install.

They aren't offloading to DX12, since DX12 is a much smaller API that does a lot less than the previous ones. They are offloading to the game engine developers.

I use them as a mapping tool for old-school grid-based CRPGs like Wizardry and Might & Magic.