Sony will leverage AMD Ryzen tech in the PS5 suggests report

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Not really - the performance was just better for the price this time around since designs weren't so different from an existing product stack. Cross platform development is a minor plus but it's not one the console makers treat as a priority. Ease of development is good, but cross platform compatibility is just one route to achieve that.

The devs who I spoke to said ease of development was an important consideration though(and the newer consoles were better in that regard than the older ones),and worked on some reasonably largish cross platform titles - the last two generations of consoles were made with ease of development in mind including having games cross platform on console and PC,and even MS is trying to unify the gaming experience on PC and console.Games cost more nowadays to make,and ease of development across platforms is a consideration especially with the timescales involved,and also the margins - look at how poor pay can be in the games industry.

The last generations were more difficult to develop for and making versions across platforms was more difficult,and that was bourne out by various devs complaining last gen about the PS3,etc having non-standard hardware which needed more fiddling around with which cost more money and time - the specs looked great on paper,but in reality getting them to perform anywhere close to their theoretical performance level(especially in the case of the PS3) was a pain. So its no fluke that BOTH Sony and MS have gone towards relatively more off the shelf PC hardware this time,with some customisations.

Having each newer console generation,being a similar uarch but with faster hardware makes things easier too,especially regarding backwards compatability,or even having a hi-lo mix for graphical settings on the newer and older consoles.

Lots of PC enthusiasts are bemoaning the fact that the newer consoles are not pushing things - they won't be as its about reducing hardware costs,dev costs and risk.

Sony and MS could easily have gone for a PowerPC based CPU in any of the last few consoles,as IBM has some decent cores over the last few years,which in theory would have been more powerful than AMD Jaguar,but they didn't.

Just because the internet thinks that some custom ARM/MIPS/PowerPC core might be a better fit,has no bearing on what Sony/MS want in their home consoles.

The 7th generation consoles went that way,and it was way too much risk(and cost) in terms of hardware and software,and this is why they lasted so long so to recoup their costs.

Plus even Sony said so:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Pl...ure,21479.html

The Official PlayStation Magazine recently conducted an interview with Michael Denny, vice president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios. They talked about the hardware behind the upcoming PlayStation 4, revealing that the developer community actually requested the x86-based platform.

Looking back, this demand for an x86-based platform really is no surprise given how many complaints Sony received regarding the PlayStation 3's hardware. Sony co-developed the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, AKA Cell, with Toshiba and IBM. It combines a general-purpose Power Architecture Core with streamlined coprocessing elements and a memory coherence architecture.

The PlayStation 3's Cell configuration includes one Power Processor Element on the core, and eight physical Synergistic Processing Elements in silicon. Developers have called this environment "challenging" which in turn reduced support for the PlayStation 3 and seemingly allowed the Xbox 360 to win the console wars.

Apparently one of the complaints heard repeatedly by developers, especially in the early days of the PlayStation 3, was that it was difficult to fit Sony's console within a PC-focused pipeline. "That’s certainly one of the points of feedback that developers had in when we were discussing in the early days of what PlayStation 4 architecture should be," Denny admitted. "But, as I say, the main thing was looking at the state of the art CPU and GPU, with ease of development."

Despite the upcoming console's PC-based guts, it's not going to be a desktop PC out-of-the-box, but a dedicated gaming console. Ultimately what this means for gamers is that they'll likely not see crappy ports, as developers can now better use their resources to create one baseline game and add specific platform–based features. Sony actually co-developed the PlayStation 4's APU with AMD, so expect some platform-specific surprises.

"I think that we learn from all the platforms we launch and systems we’ve developed," he told the magazine. "Part of PlayStation 4 is learning from previous platforms and making things better. Then part of it is the new experience as well, adding extra features, and you put those together for a much better package and much better experience for the gamer."

At the end of the day, it's about the output, he added. It's about having the best creators and development teams, the best games and the best experiences no matter what's under the console hood. But having 8 GB of high speed system memory doesn't hurt.

"[That] is just a massive win for developers in terms of the sort of games they can create, and the ease of game development," he said.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrick.../#6d5729fc2185

That is from the horses mouth(and a few others in the realworld too)!

So I don't agree with you this time,and we can leave it at that.

No more than the Dreamcast was built much like a midrange PC, albeit with an SH4 cpu in it. The barrier to easy porting is Windows and the fact you might have to contend with Intel integrated graphics. The PC isn't really a standard, it is just a collection of parts made by companies that detest each other.

If you go back and read my post #4 you can see I am quite OK with the idea that Sony should use Ryzen, it is a good choice. But that is on merit of silicon area vs performance, not because it runs amd64 instructions. Indeed if AMD had gone ahead with their version of Ryzen that ran ARMv8 instructions then the cleaner instruction set would probably have made it smaller and faster and a better choice, but history has robbed us of that so Intel compatible it is.

Having written commercial code that runs on all major and most minor computing platform operating systems and processors it is really just Windows that has been the thorn in my side. HP-UX sucked pretty majorly, but Windows is the killer. Right now I am writing code for 64 bit Linux on the PC which also runs in 32 bit Linux on ARM, as a programmer they are just Linux so there is really zero friction moving between the two.

You need to really speak to some devs about the pecularities of each console,and it is interesting on what things were limitations.

In fact look at the consoles,how they have one by one dropped lots of the unusual design oddities like the ESRAM(the comments I heard about it were interesting) - each generation is moving more and more towards hardware which is more and more closer to what is in the PC.

There are improved costs sharing hardware with PCs,instead of expensive fully custom hardware,which means more frequent and cheaper updates and lower dev costs,since a lot of the hardware is already a known quantity to some degree.

Sure a high power ARM/MIPs/PowerPC core might work,but again most large scale available ARM cores,are designed for mobile use,so probably don't scale well with clockspeeds and additional power,and some of the desktop class non-X86 cores(the ones being developed in China and the IBM ones) are not in widespread use. But again why should Sony and MS bother funding a custom desktop class ARM core,when they can go off the shelf with a proven core,which probably has less potential bugs(validated by use in PC) and is a known quantity.

MS/Sony are essentially very close to each other in hw uarch with their consoles,and they are close to PC.For two companies who are fighting each other in gaming,to BOTH go that way is not a fluke. In terms of costs and dev feedback they obviously think its more efficient going the "close to PC hardware" way.

If it had no advantages like a few of you are trying to imply,they wouldn't be going the way they are.

Even if there are automated tools to generate different builds on different uarchs,optimisation is still going to be a major consideration though - look how long it takes for most early access games to get proper performance optimisations. Now imagine if the PlayStation,Xbox and PC were all very different uarchs!!

Even the one major ARM based console,uses an off the shelf SOC which was the best part of two years old and is not that powerful,and outside its own titles,Nintendo has had poor 3rd party games support,and the ones which made it to the platform are years old anyway,and have made their money back on PC and the Sony/MS consoles. Even the ports of some PC games like PUBG to mobile,are not really ports but different versions which are substantially different from their PC/home console equivalents.

I am not saying we won't see a non-mobile orientated ARM console from MS/Sony,but seriously you would need such a desktop class core to enter the desktop market in the first place,and then for Sony/MS to adapt the tech. I cannot see them funding such a core unless they intend to make a mobile/home hybrid console like the one Nintendo has made,a PSP replacement or a replacement for the Vita TV. In all these scenarios they would be giving up processing power for lower power consumption,so expect lots of enthusiasts to moan about it.

The other scenario is if a new actor enters the fray like Apple with another console or Amazon,who wouldn't care about compatability with PC,and was more worried about their phones and tablets.

I also think going from a few of the posts I see on Hexus,some of you just don't like Windows(and by extension X86 which via a fluke got linked with it),and then are trying to downplay the PC as a platform,even though game dev is still done on PCs. After all I wonder what platform all those nice pre-release videos are running on and what platform all the initial dev kits tend to be?

I don't see this conversation going anywhere,so we can leave it at that!

[DanceswithUnix]

Blimey you might as well just say "You smell so we can just leave it at that", you can't mike drop on wild assumptions

,and even MS is trying to unify the gaming experience on PC and console.

Oh come off it, MS are trying to lock everyone into the MS ecosystem as much as possible by unifying Xbox and Windows. If they really cared about portability, then they would have thrown their weight behind Vulkan rather than re-invent it to no benefit in DirectX

some of you just don't like Windows(and by extension X86 which via a fluke got linked with it)

Fair cop I don't like Windows because I am a developer (I don't need to talk to one). Right now I am on a PC and it is running Windows because I was gaming last night, so I do see the benefits as a user. In a minute I will boot into Linux so I can get some programming done, because I have wasted enough of my life trying to get Microsoft products to be productive

I am in no way confusing x86 and Windows because most of the time I use x86 in embedded or Linux environments, and thankfully these days C/C++ compilers are good enough that I don't really even remember the CPU I am targetting. Heck, even Windows back when it was NT was written for MIPS and not 386 to make sure it was multi platform. So I'm not peeing on x86, at the high end it makes sense as the cisc overhead isn't that great, but any programmer who says there is an advantage to x86 in porting would be like talking to a cyclist who says there is an advantage in having stabilizers, it's a huge waving red flag to those of us who know what we are doing that we might be talking to someone who isn't very good at writing code.