nVidia says says that custom hardware for game consoles not feasible anymore

[Lafiel]

Aielyn said:

Lafiel said:
Yea, and all but the WiiU CPU seem to be very similar to off-the-shelf products from AMD. There should be some few customizations, but there is no new custom from the ground up designed HW for the next gen consoles anymore, unlike PS2 or PS3.

As we haven't seen the other GPUs (and we're not talking about CPUs - I hope that was a typo), I don't think we can seriously comment on whether either of the new consoles will have "similar to off-the-shelf" GPUs. The leaks aren't informative enough to decide that.

I only mentioned the WiiU CPU, because it's the odd one out. It's a custom design, but if reports are to be believed it's an old one - a GC/Wii based architecture with higher clock and additional cores, which would explain nicely why the WiiU plays Wii games.

I might give too much credit to the leaks we had the last days, but I think they look very possible. The Jaguar core CPUs in MSony's new consoles is straight off-the-shelf HW (well, not released yet), while the GPUs seem to have a little bit different configurations than standard GPUs, but base on GCN or GCN2 architecture, and WiiU's GPU is very likely to be based on the 5D-VLIV architecture, so that's all standard computer hardware with some slight customizations.

On the other hands the Cell in PS3, that was a total custom design, and so are the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer in the PS2 for example.