Current consoles are still using low-power CPU microarchitectures, albeit at higher clock speeds than the original PS4 and Xbox One. So it's still pretty easy to match the console CPU power with a modern desktop processor that has fewer CPU cores each providing much higher per-core performance. When the next generation of consoles arrives at the end of the year, the Xbox and PlayStation families will move to a desktop-class microarchitecture with performance per clock that's competitive with retail desktop processors.
I do wonder how much of an impact the PS5 and Xbox Series have on this though since they both have RDNA2 GPUs. Consoles tend to face higher optimization pressure, especially as the generation wears on. It might be why AMD has kept so competitive in gaming as of late.
> Now, compare an early Core i7 system (Nehalem) against what’s shipping today (Ivy Bridge). Clock speeds are up a bit, and there are cheaper/lower-end options available, but the Core i7-920 that launched at 2.67GHz with four cores and eight threads is still absolutely capable of powering the latest games and applications.
A big, big factor in the slowdown of obsolecense is that the current generation of consoles has stretched out far longer than is normal. Because the consoles have fairly PC-esque capabilities (arguably more parity than there has ever been before), many games released today are released on consoles and PC, often on a single code-base, at the very least on a single asset base.
Once the next generation of consoles is out, we will see games taking advantage of that extra power, and in turn PC requirements for new games will start to climb again.
SoC doesn't make as large of a difference as you'd think.
There are now enough transistors on chip for a reasonably good on-chip GPU. Plus you get better bandwidth between CPU and GPU. This is independent of the instruction architecture. The PS5's SOIC does some of the same things, though it's an x86 instruction set, not ARM.
Neither the PS5 nor the Xbox use AMD CPUs. Intel has a big problem.
Old news? When even game consoles, the standard for going proprietery for performance, went amd64/arm, the consolidation of platforms was a foregone conclusion.
I'm not sure a JITing ARM->VLIW core like that is the best choice for a game console. It'd probably lead to all sorts of weird perf inconsistencies that are hard to track down.
If I'm not too confused, historically consoles always had an edge at launch, even if small and specialized. This time I see none of that, it's off-the-shelves current hardware. Feels weird. AMD platforms are good on heavily multithreaded code, I hope that game devs will be able (with the help of a nice lib or not) take advantage of that.
AMD cpu and gpu are in playstation and xbox, and I guess that won't change next generation. Game devs optimize perf for console first I believe, so it might favours AMD in games too, albeit indirectly.
I think the CPU story is pretty reasonable this console generation. You trade single thread performance for a more powerful and space efficient design. It is just a lot easier to optimize the CPU than the GPU especially running on a gaming focused platform so console makers always trade CPU for extra graphics power.
It could be still a problem though, considering many console games use all kinds of hacks to barely run at the target resolution/framerate.
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