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Wlakiz on 17 November 2012
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zarx said:
Wlakiz said:

1. Learning to ride a bike is hard, but once you do, it's an efficent form of transportation. My point still stands that any difficulty in 'learning' or 'using' cell is alrady mitigated by the 8 years of experience that developers have.

2. 'High end engines' don't get more powerful, they just demand more resources and processing power. Since you can't upgrade consoles with more memory or better GPU, your 'next gen x86' Engines will just get out-dated after a year or two and you have no way to use the newer ones. You should not lump PC life-cycles with Console ones. 

3. I don't know where you're getting that information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices

"AMD also formed a strategic partnership with IBM, under which AMD gained silicon on insulator (SOI) manufacturing technology, and detailed advice on 90 nm implementation. AMD announced that the partnership would extend to 2011 for 32 nm and 22 nm fabrication-related technologies."

22nm is next step on ITRS

4. Theres no indication that R&D for an updated Cell woudl cost Sony '1.5b' if that is what you're implying, considering IBM already made an updated one just 4 years ago.

Engines get more complex as the hadware and games get more complex, building an engine that offers all the features that developers need and that take advantage of all the hardware features will be far more complex to build next gen. Which is why most next gen engines are now being built on high end PC because these engines now take multiple years to create by themselves. All engines get constantly upgraded but the core platform will be ported accoss, UE4, Cryengine 3, Luminous, Forstbyte 2 etc etc is going to be what next gen games are built on, and they will be optomised for whatever hardware is in the final hardware. I don't see what changing PC hardware has to do with being able to port across the engines that everyone is designing today to get ready for next gen console hardware. 

AMD APUs are all moving to 28nm next year, they are sticking to 32nm on high end FX CPUs which is not what will be in PS4. 

 

I'm not saying it would cost them $1.5b I am saying that it won't be as cheap as you seem to think it would be. They are not going to use a server CPU in the PS4.

 First of all, lets look at your 'Next Gen Engine':

CryEngine3 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryengine#CryENGINE_3

"On March 11, 2009, Crytek announced that it would introduce CryENGINE 3 at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, held from March 25 to March 27. The new engine was being developed for use on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U. As for the PC platform, the engine is said to support development in DirectX 9, 10, and 11.[14][15] "

FrostBite2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostbite_Engine#Frostbite_2
"

SIGGRAPH 2010"Tile-based deferred shading acceleration" via DirectCompute.[11] This is being ported to the PlayStation 3's SPUs.Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA), again implemented with DirectCompute, for bandwidth conservation.[11]Quasi-realtime radiosity using Enlighten from Geomerics.[12]Improved environmental destruction.[13]

"

Even if these new engines are being built for 'high end PC", they are porting their features to work with Cell architectures. If the next gen, is still using Cell, they will still port their feature to work with it.

Second of all, PC's Hardware age faster than console ones due to the simplicty for upgrades and engines will age fasters too. When Cry Engine 4 come out in the middle of the console life cycle, they woudl take advatange of the newest Hardware features, while dropping support for older ones like DirectX 9 support which some console hardware are still using. They may leave some features still supported but generally, even if you built your console to match their 'x86' archtitecture, not all feature would be usable for you. Which comes to the point - There is no 'engine advantage' to switch to X86 architecture. Staying with Cell would yield similar results.

If you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_shrink

The 28nm is just a stopgap for APU/GPUs to shrink to the lower ITRS standard. Their conventional CPU is still going from 32nm -> 22nm and the APU is going from 28nm -> 22nm.

So, it makes more sense for them to put in an 'off the shelf', high-end x86 consumer chip than to use an in-production server chip that is even more powerful, and energy efficent?