On Wednesday, 12 June 2013 at 06:40:20 UTC, Manu wrote:
On 11 June 2013 20:52, Nick Sabalausky
<[email protected]>wrote:
On Tue, 11 Jun 2013 11:39:00 +0200
"nazriel" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 08:20:33 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> > This has been known for a while, but I hadn't seen it
> > mentioned
> > here explicitly.
> >
> > Both consoles are using amd jaguar cpus, which is good
> > news for
> > us as druntime/phobos should in theory JustWork!
>
> Yeah, awesome news.
> Given that DMD itself probably will never support anything
> except
> x86(-64) so there is not much pressure to support other
> architectures in druntime.
>
> It is really great opportunity. Some new Android smartphones
> also
> are shipping with x86.
>
> But there seem to be some quirks with those CPUs:
>
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/ps4-and-xbox-one-s-amd-jaguar-cpu-examined/0116297
Wow, given the abilities of the PS3 and 360, that article
reads like
the comments of a spoiled brat.
Abilities? I think they're thoroughly uninteresting and totally
underwhelming hardware.
They're pretty weak. I wish they'd stuck with (multiple)
ridiculously high
clocked PPC's personally.
I think it sounds encouraging: It means the next gen might not
end up
pulling a 3DO on price like their predecessors did. It damn
near killed
the PS3, which took Sony some major work to finally turn
around.
Indeed, they're obviously designed to be cheap this time... or
they'd be
better, and more interesting ;)
In any case, it is nice that they're using x86. Seems like a
smart
choice. I'll admit, when I first heard about it I was
surprised at
least one of them didn't go ARM, but x86 does seem to make more
sense for a major games console at this particular point.
Personally, I think it's disappointing. x86's key advantage is
being able
to run crappy desktop code fast.
Games are not usually 'crappy desktop code', they're carefully
tuned,
purpose-specific code.
x86 uses MASSIVE amounts of its CPU realestate to tolerate
crappy code. I'd
rather use that CPU realestate on more raw power, and put the
responsibility on the engines engineering merits to make the
most of it.
This move sets a low upper limit, and the bar will start high.
I don't
anticipate you'll see much tier-ing between 1st gen -> 3rd/4th
gen games
this time round.
ARM might be better/more interesting than x86, but I actually
still think
PPC is a good architecture for the purpose. VMX/SPU is still
the best SIMD
unit.
The Jaguar cores in the xbox/ps4 don't do much hand holding, they
are more embedded chips then desktop targeted.
Either way the interesting thing about the new consoles is that
they are both HSA enabled, and the idea of being able to compile
generic c/c++/d code and run it on the gpu without using special
languages extensions(tho compiler support still needed) is what
is interesting.
Amd's HSAIL bytecode, hMMu, shared gpu/cpu memory, and cache
coherent GPU make the consoles very interesting, even if all of
these things will be in desktop machines shortly after.
