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Forums - Sony Discussion - Will the Vita have a lifespan of twelve years or more?

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Will the Vita have a lifespan of twelve years or more?

Yes. Vita has the power a... 12 19.05%
 
No. Sony will abandon the... 41 65.08%
 
Whatever, just bring Digimon to the West. 9 14.29%
 
Total:62

I don't see US retailers willingly carrying the Vita for another 5+ years, I don't care what Sony's wishes are, retail space doesn't grow on trees and retailers are not going to waste shelf space on something that sells as badly as the Vita, especially when there's like 100 different toys-to-life products they have coming (Disney Infinity, LEGO Dimensions, Amiibo, Skylanders) that need to be stocked in the game/electronics section.



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JRPGfan said:
Soundwave said:

I will eat my hat if you can find a new Vita stocked by North American retailers in 2-3 years time. I think Sony is phasing it out this year and will have a Dreamcast-like price cut for it to clear out retail inventory and that will be that in North America for the Vita anyway.

It isn't really "that powerful" either, the average modern smartphone runs circles around a Vita. The chip inside an iPhone 6 destroys the Vita. 


Iphone 6:

cpu: 1.4 GHz dual-core ARMv8-A

gpu: PowerVR Series 6 GX6450 (quad-core)

 

PS Vita:

cpu: 2 GHz Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore

gpu: Quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4+

 

Your right though basically the Iphone 6 is close to the PS vita in terms of performance.....

You just need to pay alot more for it, have worse batterylife (for gameing) and deal with not haveing the physical buttons the vita has.

The lack of physical buttons and optimization (not sure about battery life though, because that is again dependent on the microarchitecture, overall number of system components and their power consumption, and the capacity of the battery used in the device) are good points you bring up that plagues almost all smartdevices; personally this is why I prefer to game on devices like Vita and 3DS, even if they tend to be weaker.

 

However, your spec analysis between iPhone 6 and Vita is extremely flawed. You have basically run into the core and megahertz myths; in this case it is that the system with the most cores and highest clockspeed is fastest or close to being the fastest. This method is very wrong because it does not take the finer elements of each microarchitecture into account; this includes things like bandwidth, how the cores communicate to each other and how much resources they share, do the cores execute instruction in-order or out-of-order, what speed the cache is set and how much is available to the CPU, etc. When you look at benchmarks which measure these things, you will see that the dual core iPhone 6/5S will completely destroy a quad core ARM Cortex A9 even on tasks that use multiple cores (to put things into even more perspective, most benchmarks show that one core of Apple iPhone 6/5S is several times more powerful than all 4 cores of the Cortex A9); so the performance of an iPhone 6 is not even close to that of a Vita. This is similar to how a haswell dual-core mobile Intel Core i5 running at 1.8 GHZ will drastically outperform a quad-core Intel Baytrail processor running at 2.33 GHZ, or how a 4 GHZ 8 core (really 4 modules with 2 cores each) AMD piledriver CPU is outperformed by a 3.5 GHZ quad-core (really 4 cores with 2 threads per core) Ivy Bridge  Core i7 processor.

The only time when you can say that a processor is better than another because it is running at higher clock speeds and/or has more cores is when you are dealing with the same microarchitecture, and even then you cannot really generalize too much because eventually you will hit heat, space, and bandwidth limits as you are increasing cores and clock speed frequencies (there have been cases, especially recently with mobile processors where processor performance deteriorates when the processor has too many cores or is running at too high of a frequency).

By the all of the above I mentioned also applies to GPUs as well.



kristianity77 said:
Which will die first though, the Vita or the Wii U is perhaps the more open discussion.

This is an easy question. Vita won't have any successor (90% sure), WiiU's successor is rumored to be in rails. So I don't think we're going to wait too much before a new Nintendo console gets released. I expect 2.5-3 years.

Both gaming systems are my favourite for this gen. I don't think many would share my opinion. Maybe I jinxed them ?



It'll last a while longer. Many people want it dead for whatever reason though v.v All I need is freaking Dragon Quest 8 on Vita so my 3 favorite games are on one handheld platform! Sadly the 3DS is getting DQ8 v.v but I'm really hoping SE will also bring it to Vita :L



Vita will be done either this year or next in the west. Retailers are already phasing out stock.
For japan, depends on the nx. I'm pretty sure the nx is a handheld and it could speak the end of the vita if game development is moving to, or already moving to, it.



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It's going to be difficult for Sony to convince most retailers to keep the hardware in stock. But there will be software support for a good few years yet I think. I certainly see it outliving both Nintendo's current systems.



RIP Dad 25/11/51 - 13/12/13. You will be missed but never forgotten.

I get depressed talking about the Vita.

No, its not gonna last that long. Sony has already abandoned it. Its third parties and indies still releasing stuff. As much as it pains me, unless theres a huge wave of localisation announcements coming real soon, its not gonna live for more than another year on just some leftovers.



The Vita is pretty much done in North America. I never see stores stocking it anymore, and finding games is REALLY hard nowadays. No developers are supporting it, and not even Sony gives the Vita adequate time at E3 and other shows. The Vita may last until 2017. When the NX gets formally unveiled the Vita will get killed off by Sony.



No, unless you have a very broad definition of lifespan. If the rumored price slash is true, then that's basically the Vita's swan song. It's to clear out inventory, not to prolong the lifespan. In the US, the Vita has another year or two tops. In Japan, it could last about 2-3 more years as an actually supported console, then another 2 or 3 as a niche item.