| Intrinsic said: Totally changing the architecture of the PS5 makes zero sense at all. Absolutely none. There is not a single front that going with a proprietary architecture will be beneficial to Sony or anyone for that matter right now. The PS5 will be based on an x86 -64bit architecture just like how the PS4 is. That alone guarantees compatibility with the PS4. Be it BC (which will be easier) or FC. Feature wise there will obviously be differences. Mostly due to more advanced fab processes (14nm/10nm which literally means they can cram in 4-6 times more cores on a similarly sized die) but also due advances in memory (HBM which will allow for 500+GB/s mem bandwidth). But what all these translates to is just more of everything. Higher rez textures, more pixels, more geometry (models, npcs...etc) But everything I just mentioned can still be made to run just fine on the PS4 albeit with less of everything. If Sony were to change the architecture and do something like they did with the PS3 (making already hard HD development even harder) then they would have to be the single most stupid company on the planet cause it will mean they just pissed away everything that made the PS4 the developers choice console. |
The PS4 uses a proprietary architecture. They had AMD create a custom APU for them. I don't know of any other device that has the same architecture as the PS4. One x86-64 bit architecture is not always the same as another. The XBox One is x86-64 bit, but PS4 games are not compatible with it, and vice versa. You are not able to play PS4 games natively on your x64 PC.
I highly doubt that the PS5 would just be an up-clocked version of the PS4. Sony will most likely go back to the drawing board, and use the best technology possible to gain the most performance for the lowest price, even if they chose to use x86 components. If the PS5 is just an up-clocked version of the PS4, everyone will just call it a PS4.5, and that won't win them any support.
If the architectures are similar enough, Sony could potentially emulate the PS4 on the PS5, so that games could take advantage of more memory / more cores / faster GPU / etc. Going the other way is quite tricky though. If the PS5 has some new feature (like a built-in PhysX engine), how would that game run on the PS4? Would the dev want to build and test 2 different versions of each game? Would Sony try to emulate this feature on the PS4? In my opinion, the answer to both questions is no. As consumers, we will demand that devs take advantage of all new features, otherwise we will label their releases as lazy ports, and sales would suffer.








