3 ms·

I'm not sure what convinced MS and Sony to both go x64 last-gen but I wonder if part of it was that it made porting to desktop easier (and visa-versa in theory)

I'm not sure what convinced MS and Sony to both go x64 last-gen but I wonder if part of it was that it made porting to desktop easier (and visa-versa in theory). I'm not entirely sure that the same argument makes sense for Arm making ports to mobile easier because the controls for a console game aren't as easy to map to a phone so the games tend to be different. Frankly, having worked on consoles for 20 years and been through multiple architecture changes, I'd be perfectly happy to have another generation or two on x64 no matter how crusty it is -- devil you know and all.

fomine3 6y ago
I think they choose AMD, rather than x86-64. They can design high performance SoC easily by borrowing PC arch.
kllrnohj 6y ago
> I'm not sure what convinced MS and Sony to both go x64 last-gen Which generation are you referring to with 'last-gen'? If you mean PS4 / Xbox One then what else was on the high-performance CPU market other than x86 in 2012-2014? The POWER family had moved deep into HPC specialization. POWER7 was a bit old by 2013 and POWER8 wasn't quite there, but neither would make for a good gaming CPU with the heavy multithreading focus (4-way SMT on POWER7 & 8-way SMT on POWER8), and both would require substantial design changes to be scaled down to what a console would want. The ARM CPU of the time was the Cortex-A15, which was a fine mobile CPU but wasn't pushing any boundaries to make laptop or desktop CPUs nervous (and you'd have to substantially invest it its IO capabilities - there weren't really any ARM CPUs + PCI-E x16 + SATA SoCs laying around at the time) If you mean the PS5/XSX generation then I think it's simply a why not Zen 2 & keep backwards compatibility? It's not like there's anything else you can buy that's a clearly better CPU offering anyway.

3 ms·

I'm not sure what convinced MS and Sony to both go x64 last-gen but I wonder if part of it was that it made porting to desktop easier (and visa-versa in theory)

by shaggie76 6y ago

fomine3 6y ago
I think they choose AMD, rather than x86-64. They can design high performance SoC easily by borrowing PC arch.
kllrnohj 6y ago
> I'm not sure what convinced MS and Sony to both go x64 last-gen Which generation are you referring to with 'last-gen'? If you mean PS4 / Xbox One then what else was on the high-performance CPU market other than x86 in 2012-2014? The POWER family had moved deep into HPC specialization. POWER7 was a bit old by 2013 and POWER8 wasn't quite there, but neither would make for a good gaming CPU with the heavy multithreading focus (4-way SMT on POWER7 & 8-way SMT on POWER8), and both would require substantial design changes to be scaled down to what a console would want. The ARM CPU of the time was the Cortex-A15, which was a fine mobile CPU but wasn't pushing any boundaries to make laptop or desktop CPUs nervous (and you'd have to substantially invest it its IO capabilities - there weren't really any ARM CPUs + PCI-E x16 + SATA SoCs laying around at the time) If you mean the PS5/XSX generation then I think it's simply a why not Zen 2 & keep backwards compatibility? It's not like there's anything else you can buy that's a clearly better CPU offering anyway.