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the_hoffa • today at 5:11 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

This is unfortunate that it would push them in that direction, but not for the reasons you speak of.

Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).

The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.

The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.

The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".

Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?

I'm not.

And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.


Replies

thargor90 • today at 6:20 AM

While you are right about the PS4 (and xbox), the Nintendo consoles are nothing like desktop platforms.

WiiU is the same architecture as the Wii and the Switch is the same platform as Nvidia Shield.

wmf • today at 5:14 AM

Weird hardware is just worse. You can't beat mainstream CPUs or GPUs that now have decades of investment behind them.