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I always thought it was a bit odd that we went from super-compute clusters built out of PS3 to the PS4/Xbone generation consoles being meh-grade laptop chips in
by Arrath 2y ago
I always thought it was a bit odd that we went from super-compute clusters built out of PS3 to the PS4/Xbone generation consoles being meh-grade laptop chips in a fancy case.
- ethbr1 2y agoIt's the performance vs programmability tradeoff. The article references it. As one goes back in console history, the performance to achieve contemporarily visually-stunning results required exotic architectures + hand-tuned code. Over time, state of the art PC + GPU hardware improved, to the point there wasn't a functional difference vs exotic architectures. Additionally, the cost of developing leading-edge custom architectures exploded. Microsoft really pushed this with the original "PC in a box" XBox, but you saw the console OEMs outsource increasing parts of their chip solutions after that. Why keep / buy entire chip design teams, when AMD will do it for you? Especially if the performance difference is negligible.
- sillywalk 2y agoThe article also references the cost of developing a AAA "HD" title is so high that it pretty much needs to be released on multiple platforms to be profitable.
- mmaniac 2y agoPS3 was popular for compute clusters because it was sold heavily at cost at launch. That's typical for a console where the platform owner gets a slice of all software sales, but makes no sense for a general computing platform. The performance/$ was unbeatable because the economics were perverted. The PS4 was sold at break even price and couldn't run unsigned code anyway.