Both Xbox and PlayStation to get eight-core AMD Jaguar CPU
New rumors indicate that both the Xbox Next and the PlayStation 4 "Orbis" consoles may be powered by an eight-core AMD Jaguar SoC. This chip has a relatively simple design, it should run cool and one of the benefits for Microsoft and Sony is that Jaguar should be relatively easy to manufactur at different foundries, as well as to shrink it to a smaller process node. Details about the graphic chip inside the next-gen consoles are still a mystery, but Sony's console will reportedly have a more powerful graphics engine than Microsoft's next Xbox. Further details about both consoles are expected later this year.
According to Eurogamer.net’s Digital Foundry, both Microsoft Xbox “Durango” and Sony PlayStation 4 “Orbis” are going to be based on highly-integrated system-on-chips featuring AMD Jaguar x86 64-bit cores. The SoCs are projected to be conservatively clocked at around 1.6GHz, which should ensure maximum possible yields as well as low temperature of multi-core solutions. Keeping in mind that video game consoles are designed to last for many years, it is possible that SoCs inside future PlayStation and Xbox will feature certain tweaks, optimizations and innovations that will not be available on personal computers for a while.
The idea to use AMD’s low-power/low-cost cores instead of high-performance x86 cores has both pros and cons. On the one hand, AMD’s Jaguar looks very promising on paper and has a number of advantages that may be especially valuable for game consoles, including 128-bit floating point unit (FPU) with enhancements and double-pumping to support 256-bit AVX instructions as well as an innovative integer unit with new hardware divider, larger schedulers and more out-of-order resources. On the other hand, AMD’s Jaguar is substantially behind the company’s high-end x86 cores when it comes to general-purpose performance and therefore some of the operations may take a long time to complete, unless there are not special-purpose accelerators integrated or the consoles will heavily rely on GPGPU [general-purpose computing using GPUs] technologies.
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Maybe for the performance aspect although I think the compatibility requirements for DX will have an even bigger effect on performance of ports. But for controls, game design and interface it's still going to be bad unless they start building better development tools. I mean to me, the biggest issue with most console ports is the incredibly low FOV, the most difficult to navigate interface menu's and clunky control schemes that leave you feeling like you have little to no control.
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Wouldn't using a pc like CPU be a performance/longevity problem for the console?
I thought what made consoles so strong in comparison to PCs (relatively speaking of course) in the past, was that they had "custom" designed CPU architechtures and stuff?
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Wouldn't using a pc like CPU be a performance/longevity problem for the console?
I thought what made consoles so strong in comparison to PCs (relatively speaking of course) in the past, was that they had "custom" designed CPU architechtures and stuff?
Im just guessing, but i think the custom cpus just make things unnecessarly difficult for developers, so using a pc standard architecture might make the transistion to new consoles easier.
My guess anyway.
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They want expendable, like the iPhone's
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you guys keep looking at power for port compatibility when that is not the problem. the problem was the different architectures they would use. now if they both use the same as a pc then crappy ports should diminish.