this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
53 points (93.4% liked)

Technology

59148 readers
1986 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's a bit clickbaity to say Intel "lost" the PlayStation business when they didn't have it to begin with.

Sony has been using AMD CPUs for a couple generations of PlayStation now. Moving over to Intel would have screwed up backward-compatibility, adding a ton of work and striking a huge blow to efficiency if anything were going to be backward-compatible down the line and also thrown that monkey wrench into the works of any developers publishing for both generations during the switchover. The article touches on this a little bit.

Intel would have needed to present some magically miraculously sweet deal for Sony to even consider switching, and especially when Intel is doing generally crappy I can't see that being an easy thing for them to figure out.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

x86/x64 code is pretty much 100% compatible between AMD and Intel. On the GPU side it's not that simple but Sony would've "just" had to port over their GNM(X) graphics APIs to Intel (Arc, presumably). Just like most PC games work completely fine and in the same way between Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs. But they have to do that anyway to some extent even with newer GPU architectures from AMD, because PS4's GCN isn't 1:1 compatible to PS5's RDNA2 on an architectural level, and the PS4's Jaguar CPU isn't even close to PS5's Zen 2.

Other than that, you're right. Sony wouldn't switch to Intel unless they got a way better chip and/or way better deal, and I don't think Intel was ready with a competitive GPU architecture back when the PS5's specifications were set in stone.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Thank you for correcting and clarifying!