Will PS/XBX follow Nintendo's footsteps?

[Trumpstyle]

derpysquirtle64 said:

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.

Just wanna point out several things, first if the next-gen consoles launches around 2025-2026 I can easily see they having 16-core ARM cpu with more than 2x ipc than current consoles, probably clocked at 4ghz.

I don't know anything about emulation but this should make it easy for both Sony and MS to emulate previous gen games. They don't really need 100% perfect emulation anyway.

It will be AMD who builds the SOC, not Sony/MS. Most likely ARM(Cpu) + RDNA(gpu).

Second point, the main advantage ARM has over X86 is its ipc advantage, I don't know much about this but just what I read from very highly knowledgable people, X86 will lose against ARM because it's basically stuck at 4 decoders, it's very hard for a x86 cpu to go beyond this while ARM can go unlimited. Skylake from intel supposedly have 5 decoders in some press news but this is inaccurate, it has 4 decoders same as zen3. M1 has 8 decoders. It's because of the decoders ARM can have much higher ipc (Perf/ghz).

M1 has around 1.53x higher ipc than Zen3, the new snapdragon that will launch soon around 15%.

The Perf/w and smaller cores ARM gives is just a bonus.

Last edited by Trumpstyle - on 07 January 2021