I honestly don't believe microsoft is so blasè as to choose a provider who is likely to go out of business, plus their fabrication plants after launch will have enough stored resources to at least cost for 2-3 years prior to needing to order a new batch through. But it is a valid point, but thankfully we are saved by the grace of standards and I'm sure another fab plant could pick up the blueprints and run with it.
think they are using TSMC - if they go `bust` , then your new smartphones + gpu`s + everything will stop. wont happen
and in the event of a natural disaster on the same scale as the earthquake that made spindle HDD's a rarity? They aren't going to be selling/producing millions of xbones on a regular basis, I think the impact to the industry would be minimum. I like the term Xbone, kudos to whoever coined it.
Unlike with a PC GPU where AMD/NV produce the chips with a partner such as TSMC and then sell them to vendors, MS/Sony buy the rights to the chip they want altogether. They can the manufacture it themselves, protecting them from AMD going bust. Therefore if they use TSMC and the plant is destroyed in a disaster, they can simply start using a new supplier (not really simple due to tooling ect but you get my point). This is also the reason getting your design into a console is not as big a thing as you might suspect for NV/AMD. They are paid a one off amount, not royalties.
I love how there's a blatant contradiction in the very first paragraph. Go look at the performance of a high end PC (Titan, for example) compared to the current generation of consoles. It's a lot more than 10x, and that's with a single GPU. So if their benchmarks are right, the new consoles will at best match a current mid-range PC, which is pretty much what we're all expecting them to do. All this "a generation ahead" stuff is total nonsense. I have to assume that someone, somewhere, at some point, overheard a comment about how the integrated memory design is very cutting edge and totally misunderstood what was being discussed.
After waking up from a nap I realized one thing: Direct to metal made a larger difference back when Consoles used massively different architectures compared to PCs (the PPC cores, custom graphics etc). But now, there's a closer and more similar parity. Which means that the lead will be much smaller and it's life cycle shorter. Basically the advantage for a console is that it doesn't have to deal with the API and OS overhead as with normal PCs. So even if it's raw computational power is smaller, the lack of overhead gives it a much larger if not unseen advantage.
In terms of hardware architecture, I can't think of any PC that's on the market sporting the unified architecture of the upcoming consoles, so in that aspect they are correct. In terms of purely technical power, they aren't much to write home about - most will still be limited to the 1080p of HDMI, in order to maintain frame rates the games will still trim AA, and we'll still have to deal with the >75% occlusion to cut down on rendering grunt (Crysis 1 vs 2, you'll see). But the plus to this is that we can look forward to another round of ports - with hopefully better support for modern hardware.
Didn't the current generation use an API a lot of the time anyway? That was the impression I got last time I spoke to someone who knew what they were talking about (I dont ) All of these articles also seem to be forgetting that in optimising a game for their consoles, they'll be massively boosting performance on PCs at the same time.
At the start of a new console launch they use a Api. Later on in the console development cycle they are coding to metal. Hence you get games like uncharted 3 and the last halo both looked awesome and alot better than the launch titles on the 2 respective consoles. Remember a 7800gt is what's effectively in the ps3 that ran bf3 still if you put that card in your pc you would not even get it to load. Let alone run.
Looking for someone who has tried it, I'm intrigued. I know BFBC2 ran fine on a 7800 GTX, but yeah, slightly older game and slightly faster GPU.
What we need is an OS streamlined/optimized specifically for PC gaming without all the overhead bloat that comes with a Windows OS.
You would probably still need the API such as directx or opengl in order to run games on such a system, because you still have the massive variety of hardware which will need to be dealt with. The API is the biggest cause of slow down not the O/S itself.
Very true. With this gen I think we'll see the consoles reach their limits more quickly since the hardware is so familiar and similar. Fingers xsd, as that can only mean good things for PC graphics.
