Does the Xbox Scorpio Posses any real threat to the PC Market

[WolfDeville]

No lol

[patrickjp93]

7 hours ago, FPSwithaWacomTablet said:

Kinda wished more powerful hardware didn't mean increased difficulty in software development... RIP PS3 and Vita. For now their job (game devs) is easier since they switched to an x86 architecture (essentially PC gaming) with AMD chipsets, but I wonder how Cell/PowerPC would have done in 4K.

 

@patrickjp93, what are your thoughts?

GPU is the big bottleneck even for consoles. ARM and PowerPC can be used to make CPUs strong enough to support them. The Summit supercomputer being built for the DOE is certainly proof of IBM's capability. The downside to both ARM and PowerPC is that optimization is much tougher due to having a smaller instruction set being required to do something highly complex. In PPC's case there's also its very wide SMT design that would be troubling for game developers.

 

For Power 8 processors, each core after 0 can only be activated if all 8 threads it is capable of supporting are launched. That increases design rule complexity harshly. Further, it also makes the cores very hot. Unless IBM dialed back the clocks significantly, you'd be looking at a 250W CPU in an XBox with PowerPC.

 

In ARM's case, you don't have any SMT designs. Each core gets one thread. You have plenty of vendors making custom architectures too, so you have competition for a contract which is good for pricing. You also have the Clang compiler which is easier to modify for a new special ARM chip than GCC is. In ARM's case though, someone has to make a much more complete, robust big.LITTLE framework where the programmers can knowingly set core affinity. It would be like to have an A7 watching the network while an A72 or a new A73 did the talking to the GPU. To have the power efficiency needed to support a bigger GPU in that form factor, the optimization for power both at the chip design and programming levels has to be top notch. Those are the hurtles for PPC and ARM.

 

Heck, even AMD could apply many of the same principles and have 1-2 Zen cores supported by a Puma+ cluster for a future console SOC. It would just be new vs. the ARM ecosystem where everyone now has experience with the b-L design rules.

[Praesi]

Not at all. Just another attempt to fool People.