Comment by alexjplant
Comment by alexjplant 4 days ago
> Nvidia has graphics chips, but it doesn't have the CPUs. Yes, Nvidia can make ARM CPUs, but they haven't been putting out amazing custom cores.
Ignorant question - do they have to? The last time I was up on gaming hardware it seemed as though most workloads were GPU-bound and that having a higher-end GPU was more important than having a blazing fast CPU. GPUs have also grown much more flexible rendering pipelines as game engines have gotten much more sophisticated and, presumably, parallelized. Would it not make sense for Nvidia to crank out a cost-optimized design comprising their last-gen GPU architecture with 12 ARM cores on an affordable node size?
The reason I ask is because I've been reading a lot about 90s console architectures recently. My understanding is that back then the CPU and specialized co-processors had to do a lot of heavy lifting on geometry calculations before telling the display hardware what to draw. In contrast I think most contemporary GPU designs take care of all of the vertex calculations themselves and therefore free the CPU up a lot in this regard. If you have an entity-based game engine and are able to split that object graph into well-defined clusters you can probably parallelize the simulation and scale horizontally decently well. Given these trends I'd think a bunch of cheaper cores could work as well for cheaper than higher-end ones.
I think a PS6 needs to play PS5 games, or Sony will have a hard time selling them until the PS6 catalog is big; and they'll have a hard time getting 3rd party developers if they're going to have a hard time with console sales. I don't think you're going to play existing PS5 games on an ARM CPU unless it's an "amazing" core. Apple does pretty good at running x86 code on their CPUs, but they added special modes to make it work, and I don't know how timing sensitive PS5 games are --- when there's only a handful of hardware variants, you can easily end up with tricky timing requirements.