| Wlakiz said:
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 " 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? |
That is beside the point, the point was that going for x86 isn't going to make devs lives harder like you claim. There are already versions of the engines running on x86, so porting older versions of the engines from the PS3 to a new versions would really offer no advantage over x86 to any dev that wasn't Sony first party.
The x86 architecture or a more traditional Power based CPU would be much easier to work with and offer many performance advantages over the CELL. The areas that the CELL excels at (and crushes any other CPU) can for the most part work better on a modern GPU. As you yourself said APIs like CUDA are programed in a similar way as the CELL, tho likely even harder again to work with and less flexible so will likely only be used via middleware for physics etc for the most games. And for offloading GPU tasks they would be better just investing in a more powerful GPU and make devs lives easier.
SoC/APU designs are moving to the halfstep so that they can fabricate the GPU, and CPU components on the same proccess.
But I digress, the arguement is pointless, we will just have to wait and see what Sony decide.
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