[Info-vax] OT: SONY's PS4 announcment

[Neil Rieck]

Sorry for the intrusion here but at the end of the day I still get off on all things "computer".

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On Feb-20, SONY unveiled some of the technical details around their eighth-generation gaming platform still commonly referred to as PS4. They will be shifting away from the custom Cell Broadband Engine (a.k.a. POWER) currently found in the PS3 to an 8-core x86 CPU from AMD called "Jaguar". The CPU hype (marketecture?) includes an embedded Radeon GPU which they now refer to as an APU. Apparently, the whole system (main memory and all) will feature 8 GB of GDDR5 RAM (usually only found on graphic cards).

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On the flip side, there are many rumors flying around the net claiming that sometime in 2013, Microsoft will announce the XBOX-720 (also heard "Durango"). They will supposedly be shifting from the tri-core PowerPC found in the XBOX-360 to some kind of x86 CPU from AMD.

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So it looks like the video game publishing business (which is way bigger than Hollywood) will finally have an easier time publishing for three platforms after the move to x86. My only concern is the amount of viruses and malware which will spring up as a result :-)

I never thought I'd see this industry shift from RISC to CISC.

NSR