Microsoft and Sony are finally agreeing on something

[DonFerrari]

JEMC said:

fatslob-:O said:

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 ...

Sooner or later AMD will hit a wall with the GCN architecture and need something else to continue going forward. Consoles are important for them, no doubt about that, but they can't fall much behind Nvidia in the PC and server market. 

When AMD revealed their roadmap, the two listed improvements of Navi were "Next Gen Memory" and "Scalability". While the first thing is quite obvious, we don't know what they mean with "Scalability", but it could include a new architectureto make it happen.

DonFerrari said:

I doubt they would expend a lot of money to keep AMD from changing their architeture... if the new one brings more power for less cost why keep the old one? For Backward Compatibility? We have seen time and time again how much crap the consumer gives to it (none)

It's true that they don't really care about BC, but that's only one of the problems of having a new architecture. The biggest problem is how they would sell the latest iteration of GCN powered consoles and how they would announce a new one that breaks with the past consoles.

I mean, what would happen if the non-compatible PS/Xbox comes out three years after the latest GCN powered PS/Xbox, that were priced at $450? How would the people that jumped to those last iterations of PS4/X1 react? And what about developers, how would they react? Would they move on and only support the new console(s)? Would they develop for the new consoles and all the past machines, or would they just support the new ones and the latest iterations of PS4/X1?

What we have seen so far is that once a new gen starts devs migrate to the new platform and release there. If BC is easy to program in the new gen to back gen they may do it, if not they will just carry on as usual.

Actually depending on the gap between the power it's possible that even if keeping same architeture and being possible to easily code for both platforms and even release only one version they will only support last gen for 1 or 2 years, same as always. There doesn't seem to be any real gain in developing to last gen unless it's really simple (like Fifa/PES have been doing for at least since PS2 days).