| OdinHades said: I don't get why people think this will be a short generation. I think it will be at least as long as Gen 7. The tech just doesn't evolve as fast as in the past. CPUs a re pretty much stagnating and considerably faster GPU units are so damn expensive that they aren't interesting at all for a console. On top of that, you don't see as much difference as back in the day from more hardware power. The resolution might go up a little, the fps might go up a little, but that's pretty much it. If there was a new console in 2 or 3 years, we would be seeing Cross-Gen titles like there's no tomorrow, because every game could be easily ported to the last gen. With that happening, many many people will just stick to their PS4/X1, because why should they throw out another 400+ $ when the old console is doing just fine and is still getting all major games? It would be a pretty high risk for any manufacturer to release a console too early. New consoles will arrive when they are needed and the most important thing for that are significantly faster APU units. They need to be at least 5 times faster, better yet would be factor between 8 and 10. An APU like that isn't even on the horizon yet and you sure as hell won't be seeing a manufacturer packing a dedicated GPU into a console. The price would be insane, same as the power usage. Not interesting for the mass market. Moore's law is pretty much gone and that's why I think console generations will only get longer and longer from here on out. I don't expect a PS5 before 2020. |
CPUs are stagnating since there isn't any pressure on Intel right now from AMD (may change with Zen) or IBM (at servers) to develop any faster. Intel is absolutely dominating the market, with the exeptions of the low power mobile and embedded markets where ARM shines.
As for GPU, the main problem had been the problems with the 20nm process being barely any better than the old 28nm process. Which is why they where stuck there for 4 years now. 14/16nm will give a big boost to mid tier GPUs (those in range both financially and in TDP for consoles), and architectonal changes will further boost them. And by then mid tier will be former highest end performance, like former Hawaii or GTX 780 like range of performance.
Also, with the bottlenecks in drawcalls and bandwith being dealt with, GPUs can continue to grow at a fast pace.
About the APUs in PCs being much smaller, that's true. But the reason is not the APUs themselves, the reason is they lack bandwith coming from the RAM, as dedicated memory for them is pretty expensive (in form of eDRAM at least, just check Intel chips with Iris Pro graphics). If there wasn't this problem, I'm pretty sure AMD would already have released an APU which would compete at least with the XBO in performance. With Zen and DDR4-3200 this will already come close, but if AMD adds some on-chip/on-die memory (like HBM or HMC) a octacore APU with 16 Compute Units (PS4 has 18) would be very possible.
Moore's law is still in place, you just need to look in the right direction, and that's servers. But I agree to a degree, due to lack of a worthy rival for Intel (80% of the TOP500 servers have Intel CPU in them), it will probably slow down here too unless AMD and/or IBM get competitive again.
I do believe however that XBO might get a sucessor first, as it's struggling even more with 1080p/60fps than it's main rival (and saleswise too, of course), but when the XBO gets it's sucessor PS5 must follow soon to stay competitive.
