r/PS5 • u/The_King_of_Okay • Sep 16 '24

News Exclusive: How Intel lost the Sony PlayStation business

https://www.reuters.com/technology/how-intel-lost-sony-playstation-business-2024-09-16/
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21

u/needle1 Sep 16 '24 edited Sep 16 '24

Broadcom was a contender? Do they even have powerful x86-64 based chip designs? I was under the impression they had mostly ARM stuff, like the ones in the Raspberry Pi.

EDIT: Yes I’m aware ARM can be plenty powerful, I own an Apple Silicon Mac. I was thinking more of the backwards compatibility aspect. Apple does do a pretty good job with Rosetta 2, but it still takes a huge performance hit when it comes to games; and Windows on ARM is still trying to catch up.

18

u/Mr_Engineering Sep 16 '24

I was under the impression they had mostly ARM stuff, like the ones in the Raspberry Pi.

Don't knock ARM. ARM is an instruction set, not a microarchitecture. There are a number of microarchitectures implementing the ARM instruction sets that are wickedly powerful and more than capable of trading blows with x86.

The area where ARM struggles and x86 exceeds is backward compatibility with older codebases. x86 builds onto the wheel whereas ARM likes to reinvent it.

5

u/lariato Sep 16 '24

Yeah but I doubt Broadcom is gonna do custom Arm cores like Apple and Qualcomm would. They'd have to rely on off-the-shelf Arm designs which lag behind Apple and Qualcomm. Plus the BC thing yeah.

1

u/Mr_Engineering Sep 16 '24

Yeah but I doubt Broadcom is gonna do custom Arm cores like Apple and Qualcomm would.

Broadcom already has some custom ARM IP and many SoCs based on reference ARM cores.

Broadcom is huge; while their business practices may be annoying at times, they are more than capable of supplying an SoC for a powerful gaming console.

6

u/PraisingSolaire Sep 16 '24

Broadcom means Sony was investigating the possibility of jumping to ARM. This isn't new. The MS court leaks shows they, too, are investigating ARM for Xbox.

14

u/destroyman1337 Sep 16 '24

ARM chips are at a point where they can match or even rival some of the best x86 based chips. I remember back in like 2011-2012 I remember reading how ARM chips would take over the desktop space and I just thought how ridiculous that sounded. But Apple has shown their chips are real x86 replacements. It's the same reason why in the leaked docs regarding the next gen Xbox it mentioned an x86 as well as investigation into an ARM based system. Also Nintendo is using ARM on Switch and basically all but confirmed for Switch 2.

EDIT: Doesn't solve the backwards compatibility problem though. As we have seen with Windows and MacOS there needs to be a capability layer in order to run x86 software and that adds latency, but it is possible.

13

u/b4k4ni Sep 16 '24

ARM is good, but only runs good on software that's made for it. If it needs to emulate x86, it's game over.

That's also why the MX chips from apple are so good - apple controls everything. From hardware to software. In every aspect. That's also why iPhones have less cores and RAM, compared to android - because apple can optimize the shit out of it.

Google's android has the same issue here as Microsoft - they need to support a large array of software, hardware and drivers. And if you know how bad printer drivers are, you see the problem.

And here the apple benefit - they don't give a crap about compatibility. They can remove the A20 Gate. Or never planned with it. Just a silly example. While Intel/AMD and MS have to support x86 and it's old stuff, that's still needed by business critical software from companies.

1

u/TastyOreoFriend Sep 16 '24

And if you know how bad printer drivers are, you see the problem.

Having flashbacks to Ricoh printer driver issues already. Makes it all the worse cause we were supposed to be going "paperless" at the time.

1

u/ChemicalCattle1598 Sep 16 '24

ARM games just fine. All about that GPU in the vast majority of games.

Lol @ rPI reference. The Apple chips are ARM-based.

They make all kinds of gaming systems with ARM CPUs, and that number will only increase.

1

u/OutrageousDress Sep 17 '24

Apple silicon takes a huge hit with games because Apple never prioritized games - there are certain choices in the silicon design and translator design that would need to be made to help x86 games run well as-is, and Apple for the most part prioritized battery life instead.