> 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 e

> 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.