They could all use identical cgu/gpu hardware with each getting their own hardware coded drm version of the chip. And why not? Nintendo's steamrolling success proved it's not about who has the best graphics.
I wouldn't call Nintendo's success a steamrolling yet for the generation. They made it out of the gate very quickly, but their sales trend is very poor right now. The HD twins have about 60% of the market this year- versus about 45% a couple of years ago, and the trend is accelerating in their favor. Not saying the Wii is doing poorly in any way, but it appears that Nin is going to have to launch a new platform some time prior to the others which significantly changes the ROI involved in such a platform not to mention that their tie rate isn't comparable to the HD twins. In the mainstream Nin has done exceptionally well, but mainstream players buy a lot less games and play a lot less often then the hardcore market the HD twins cater to. Tie rate is the biggest factor as that it what drives profits for MS and Sony, Nin lives on first party sales which dominates the financials for their platform and as such they have made loads of cash(with multiple titles hitting the 20 million sold realm, Sony and MS have never had a first party title hit that number).
Ten years is a very long time in hardware, and the target IS still single display 1080P.
The target is 1080p 3D, that's effectively 1920x1080 w 4x AA @120fps.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-480-3-way-sli-crossfire,2622-11.html
Tri SLI GTX 480s, the fastest graphics setup money can buy, doesn't hit half the performance level of a game that will be considered rather dated by the time the next gen consoles hit. Crossfire 5870s can't hit
four frames per second at that setting, less then 1/30th of the performance target for the next gen consoles. You honestly think APUs are going to be 30 times faster then a 5970 when the next gen consoles launch? Again, this is a title that will be considered outdated by the time they do come out.
Why bust your engineering/cost balls and run in the red for five years in an vain attempt to claim 'best graphics' in the next generation like Sony did in the last generation?
Sony's cost problem was the BluRay drives which they were leveraging to win a 'format war'. They won that 'war' btw. Their graphics chips are quite cheap(easily observable by looking at the small impact they have on nV's bottom line versus the number of PS3s sold).
For Cell, right now they are at 115mm die size with four times the computational power of the fastest i7 in terms of raw SP FLOPS, the i7 pushing 263mm die size with less computational power. Sony also has full rights to the Cell IP which means they don't need to pay extra to get it fabbed for them. A chip less the half the size which they own the rights to with ~4x the peak throughput of the top x86 part. It shouldn't take people too long to figure out why x86 doesn't stand a chance in the console market. If the 6xxx series of parts shipped and they were four times faster then the GTX 480 and cost significantly less, what do you think that would do to nVidia? That is precisely what Intel or AMD face trying to get into the console market. Too expensive, too large, and too slow.
Will a common hardware/development platform happen?
No chance. Even if their were some miniscule possibility of it happening, it would be based around a POWER derivative and not x86. The PC is currently selling about 40 million games per year, consoles are selling 400 million. The consoles are currently all running PPC/POWER based chips- if their is a common platform, it will be using IBM's flavor of processors, not Intel or AMD's.
So from a business point of view, x86 is slower, larger, hotter and more expensive with the only benefit being ease of porting to the PC. Why would anyone take the x86 parts? Strictly from a cost perspective, going with a PowerVR licensed design along with using Cell IP would be the cheapest option they could get out of the gate, still nothing to do with using AMD or Intel.
Just an fyi the 36o & PS3 actually use the same IBM power PC CPU core.
One of Cell's cores is close in design to the 360's CPU, the chips are extremely different outside of that though. I have read the book btw.
Sony actually wanted the GPU integrated into the CPU.
Sony wanted to use software rendering ala Larrabee. Their idea was to use dual Cell's, one for CPU work and one for graphics rendering. KK was rather vocal and open about this, it was an utterly stupid idea that never had a chance of working, the realized this late in development and decided to go to nV for a quick fix. They never had intentions of using a traditional GPU integrated on die with their CPU.
That doesn't change the fact that Tegra 2 is limited compared to other ARM brands and is falling behind the mobile CPU curve.
Really, that is interesting. Could you please explain why every cell phone maker besides RIM and Apple have announced their next halo phones as being Tegra2 powered? I'm rather curious here, most of them have also announced Tegra2 tablets as being their high end option.
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