Radeon RX Vega revealed

[fatslob-:O]

Pemalite said:

You need an x86 license that allows you to use x86 extensions.

A license is just an agreement between participating parties, what you want is access to the patents themselves ... 

Pemalite said:

I think we might be a couple generations away from that still yet.

I think we're on the cusp of it and I imagine Sony and Microsoft will collaborate with AMD on making demands for hardware features on GCN that will accelerate ray intersection tests ...

Pemalite said:

Graphics Core Next is an extremely modular design anyway, which is why AMD has been able to make constant iterative updates to parts of the architecture with minimal effort/cost whilst leaving the rest of the architecture identical to it's prior versions.

It's also why they can take parts of newer architectures and add them to older designs like with what they did with the Xbox One X and Playstation 4 Pro.

Vega is supposed to be largest deviation from prior Graphics Core Next designs with massive backend overhauls.

So if Sony wanted to, they could take a theoretical Graphics Core Next 6/7 design and regress say... The shaders to be compliant at a hardware level to Graphics Core Next 1.0 if they wanted.

But I believe that would be a silly approach to take. There are ways around such hardware incompatabilities using software-based approaches.

The most realistic software based approach would be just exposing the the microcode functionality as instrinsics so that way you don't introduce incompatiblities that breaks the API specs ...