Mon Feb 25, 2013 12:25 am
I'm seeing quite a bit of discussion on this thread regarding PS4's use of eight Jaguar cores. And it's quite strange why Sony (and perhaps Microsoft too) would pick Jaguar to power their next-gen consoles. Now, I don't know how much faster each Jaguar core used in the PS4 is compared to each of Sony's 'Cell' core in the PS3, or how much faster a Jaguar core used in the Xbox Infinite is (Sony and MS may run their Jag cores at different clocks, or may have some custom design mixed in) compared to one of the Xbox 360's Xenon (or Xenos) CPU cores, but Jaguar obviously isn't gonna break any world records, not now, not 5 years from now. So you have to wonder just what these console makers are thinking.
I'm siding with predictions here that games will increasingly be multi-threaded. Given the graphics muscle each of the next-gen consoles offer, Jaguar obviously isn't gonna cut it with just a few cores driving a beefy GPU to run a high-power title. Given this, game developers are obviously being encouraged (or forced) to use as many cores as they can (whether they like it or not), not just to drive the performance of their particular game for either console, but to push better coding practices and techniques in general to use more and more cores, which will obviously help PC gaming as well.
Now, helping PC gaming obviously isn't on Sony's agenda, but it obvious is for MS, which has a vested interest in PCs in general. So why would Sony use Jaguar just like MS (purportedly) will? It's x86 compatibility. Perhaps the game devs have been crying out to console makers to make it easier for them to port games between platforms, and going x86 all the way will obviously help make everyone's lives easier. Game titles, especially the big ones, are by no means cheap to develop, and tediously porting each title just so it could run on a particular console isn't the most sensible thing in the world. And people couldn't care less too about which CPU ISA is used inside their console or PC. As long as games run fine, they're ok with it. The odd man out here would be Nintendo which is still relying on PowerPC. If Wii U doesn't sell well, I'm not sure game devs will be tempted to port their games for the Wii U especially if they're getting enough sales from the other systems. Then again, that's just my opinion.
Moving forward, I think we'll see more and more titles pushing the FX chips out there. Intel may well counter this trend by adding more cores to negate the FX's advantage. Given their process lead it's probably gonna be easier for Intel to add more cores than AMD. As AMD and everyone knows, they can't fend Intel off forever so they're starting to play in adjacent markets now. Who knows, 20 years from now AMD may be selling Cola.
Looks like AMD is again paving the way for Intel to push technology further. It happened with AMD64, HyperTransport, multi-core x86 CPUs, FMAx, etc. that in the end, will still put AMD in second place. What AMD can do, Intel can do too, with far more R&D and marketing money. It's the reality, folks. The best we can do is buy AMD products but it can only help so much.
NEC V20 > AMD Am386DX-40 > AMD Am486DX2-66 > Intel Pentium-200 > Cyrix 6x86MX-PR233 > AMD K6-2/450 > AMD Athlon 800 > Intel Pentium 4 2.8C > AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 > AMD Phenom II X3 720 > AMD FX-8350 > RYZEN?