<story><title>The x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-signals-a-sea-change-in-the-console-industry.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FooBarWidget</author><text>What? The instruction set matters very little. Pretty much all games are written in C++ and last time I checked there are C++ compilers targeting pretty much any architecture in existence. The graphics API is more important than the instruction set.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>The article fails to mention the audience this is good news for: PC gamers. If next generation consoles are x86 based, expect to see future games being more widely available on PC, and, better yet, expect the &quot;best&quot; versions of those games (in terms of graphics, features, etc.) to be the PC versions. The only catch is if the game developers hold back on PC releases due to fears of piracy, but on the whole this probably will still mean many more releases on PC.&lt;p&gt;That said, most flagship titles (Halo, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, etc.) will probably stick to a single console due to contractual obligations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>angersock</author><text>How can I get a ticket to the magical land of milk and honey you come from, where C++ performs well on all architectures without extra work?&lt;p&gt;As other posters have mentioned, weird processors (notably freaks like the Cell) can require a lot of knowledge of the instruction set and chip quirks (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.insomniacgames.com/category/research-development/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.insomniacgames.com/category/research-development/&lt;/a&gt; for a lot of good info on this), even requiring you to throw away your nice virtual object hierarchies and things to make the SPUs happy ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.insomniacgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/GDC_2009_spugp2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.insomniacgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/GDC...&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;p&gt;Also, just because a compiler targets an architecture doesn&apos;t mean that it can optimize code for it worth a damn.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: oh god it may even lie about its program counter ( &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.insomniacgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/gdc2009_spu_wrangling.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.insomniacgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/gdc...&lt;/a&gt; )</text></comment>
<story><title>The x86 PlayStation 4 could signal a sea-change in the console industry</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/the-x86-playstation-4-signals-a-sea-change-in-the-console-industry.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FooBarWidget</author><text>What? The instruction set matters very little. Pretty much all games are written in C++ and last time I checked there are C++ compilers targeting pretty much any architecture in existence. The graphics API is more important than the instruction set.</text></item><item><author>gfodor</author><text>The article fails to mention the audience this is good news for: PC gamers. If next generation consoles are x86 based, expect to see future games being more widely available on PC, and, better yet, expect the &quot;best&quot; versions of those games (in terms of graphics, features, etc.) to be the PC versions. The only catch is if the game developers hold back on PC releases due to fears of piracy, but on the whole this probably will still mean many more releases on PC.&lt;p&gt;That said, most flagship titles (Halo, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, etc.) will probably stick to a single console due to contractual obligations.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scott_s</author><text>The Cell processor was very different, architecturally. I can easily see games originally designed for the PS3 to require significant effort to port to the 360 and PC. (While the 360 used a PowerPC processor that actually reused assets from the Cell, it was architecturally not that different from typical x86 multicores.)</text></comment>