| Jumpin said: It'll be interesting. If Sony and Xbox don't move to ARM architecture in 7 years, or some similar RISC, then Nintendo's next console is going to blow them away in power. There is no way X86 is going to keep up with the momentum of ARM at this point. X86 is a dinosaur that's heading toward extinction. The M1 chip is exactly the sort of direction that consoles will be taking - it won't be Apple, but some Nvidia solution. The fact that Apple came to the playing field with entry level chips in cheap-ass macs that are already smoking high-end chips in certain capacities just makes you wonder how far ahead they'll be in 2-3 years. ARM tech is where the biggest investment is happening. Apple is an American company that has risen to #1 in the Japanese desktop PC market thanks to the M1 Mac Mini seizing 26% of the PC market. I can see them advancing worldwide market share if the competition doesn't quickly transition. My opinion, Microsoft switches Xbox to ARM by 2026. If Sony doesn't, in 7 years, Playstation is toast, it won't have any compelling feature except a very very loud fan system. Would you like to know more? |
Both AMD and Intel could decide to give direct access to their microarchitectures, bypassing the x86 translation layer that would be used just for legacy applications (and could be gradually abandoned when emulation starts reaching the native performances of the last x86 CPUs, but could be dropped altogether, saving silicon, for CPU models targeted to users not needing legacy).
Basically, the generation approach stops for the next years required x86 performances at PS5 APU level for PS5 exclusives, while PS5/XBS multiplats will just need XBSS APU performances as minimum requirements, this means that if next gen x86 will be abandoned, new RISC CPUs with legacy x86 BC will just need a bypassable translation layer capable of supporting 7 years old x86 performances, for the transistor numbers APUs and GPUs will have by then, it will be a modest increase. Such transition would be a lot more painless than on PC, where x86 performances will keep on growing through the whole generation.
