5 ms·
I would expect this to be more viable than ever, now that the cost of console hardware is so heavily subsidised by online subscription services.
by krilly 7y ago
I would expect this to be more viable than ever, now that the cost of console hardware is so heavily subsidised by online subscription services.
- wmf 7y agoMost people have been saying that consoles are less subsidized now than they used to be.
- masklinn 7y agoThe CPUs of modern console are pretty standard general-purpose CPUs: the PS4 and XB1 use customised AMD APU, and the Switch uses a Tegra X1. That's not useful for supercomputers. The PS3 was using a pretty weird CPU, which importantly had a single general-purpose core but 6 SIMD co-processors, making it very useful for compute tasks on supercomputers. These days you'd use off-the-shelf compute-oriented FPGA or stream / GPGPU units paired with general-purpose CPUs e.g. OLCF-4 has 9216 general-purpose CPUs driving 27648 Tesla V100.
- DerekL 7y agoAlso, console makers collect fees from third-party game publishers, whether it's on physical media or it's downloaded. I don't know how much profit comes from each source.