| JEMC said: They don't need AMD to go down to have troubles. What if, after Polaris and Vega, AMD decides that it can't improve their GCN architecture and design a new one? It's not that hard to imagine. How will Sony and Microsoft react to that? To me, these new consoles only prove that consoles are becoming more and more like PCs, and that's not necessarily a good thing. |
Sony and Microsoft would most likely react negatively if they had long term plans for backwards compatibility ...
But I highly doubt AMD is going to shelve their baseline GPU architecture anytime soon when it was designed for the future and they intended for it to have hardware extensions from the start of it's release ... (C++ support, extremely fast local atomics, fully bindless architecture, stateless compute, tons of inspiration from Intel Larrabee etc ...)
AMD would be insane to throw away years and years worth of current uncapitalized foundation and once all three console manufacturers double down on GCN once more, AMD should lobby Microsoft hard to share more features from the customized DirectX API on Xbox for PC so that they too can thrive while trying to cement GCN as the x86 of GPUs with future iterations or hardware extensions ...
If AMD does decide to ditch GCN in favour of something else then I guess all three console maufacturers can try to bribe AMD to the high heavens while funding some of the latter's R&D expenses to extend the GCN architecture since the former will probably still get a better deal than the latter's competitor ...
There's a positive side effect to becoming more like PCs since it'll streamline game development and there's more guarantees of backwards compatibility ...
