Hiku said:
derpysquirtle64 said:
First of all, if mid-men refresh happens this gen again, it certainly will be x86-based as well. If we look to provided Apple example - it took them at least 4 years from what we know to plan and make this transition to ARM happen and that's also taking into account that they've had engineers working on such SoCs for iPhones and iPads for years prior to that. Something that both Sony and Microsoft don't have. It all comes down to both companies having to make such decision already which they obviously didn't make, so ARM mid-men refresh is out of question.
Now, let's assume that the potential next-gen would be the time that both companies will think about moving away from X86.
I'll first start with Sony, because it's more easier in my opinion. Sony is not a big tech company nowadays, far from it. They simply don't have the resources to keep a state of engineers to build SoCs for them, like Apple does. So, the only way for them would be to buy an existing solution for partners and maybe ask them to make some tweaks (similar to what Nintendo did with Tegra and nVidia). The problem is - BC. We already see that all backwards compatibility on Playstation consoles is built around the idea of having the same or double core GPU config. Like PS4 -> PS4 Pro. PS4 Pro just had two PS4 GPUs stuck together and running at higher clock. PS5 GPU has the exact same core config as PS4 Pro does, but once again running at higher clocks.
So, the conclusion is - PS6 going ARM way is possible if x86 will end up at a really huge disadvantage over ARM by the time PS6 is gonna enter the planning phase (which I don't think is quite likely), but it will most likely end up in PS6 having no backwards compatibility with PS4 and PS5 games.
Now, for Microsoft. Recently there has been a Bloomberg report that Microsoft is looking into building their own ARM chips in house, just like Apple does. But as it is usual for Microsoft nowadays, the main goal is to use them for Azure cloud. Unlike Sony, Microsoft has the capability and resources to hire engineer to build their own ARM SoCs if they really see some advantage there. And given that all existing Xbox One games and Xbox Series X|S games are running in Hyper-V containers from what we know, I don't think it will be an impossible task for MS engineers to prepare some low-level command translation software like Rosetta to make this virtualized containers running on a completely different architecture. The problem with Microsoft is - will they really see a reason to put quite a lot of resources into such transition for Xbox hardware which is not selling really well? I don't think so. It's still a big question mark about will we even see the next Xbox console iteration or not and we are talking about Microsoft investing a ton of resources into making x86 - ARM transition for the very small and almost irrelevant for them part of their business.
So, the conclusion for Microsoft is - they can pull it off without any issues if they will see the need for that (which they probably won't)
P.S. Also, the ARM chips main advantages over x86 are scalability and power-efficiency. It does not seem like these things are the priority for both Sony and Microsoft consoles. |
You said pretty much what I was going to say. Plus a lot more. Though I'll add that I don't think Microsoft consider 50M units sold as not much, or not enough to be worthwhile.
Maybe someone in the upper management of MS does, but I think the current heads of Xbox plan to continue this in the next generation, even if they sell similar amounts of units again. It's still fairly profitable for them due to all the software and subscriptions sold. |
Hard to disagree with the fact that 50m consoles sold is quite a good number especially in case of Microsoft if they will have lots of steady revenue incomes from other sources by then. I just personally don't see any potential scenario where Microsoft ditches console hardware in hope that they can make up that revenue from cloud and PC alone. 50m console owners completely locked to your ecosystem is just way too big piece of the pie to get rid of it.
