I recall reading that when Microsoft selected IBM and AMD to design the CPU and GPU respectively for the Xbox 360 they wanted (and received) the IP so they could produce the chips themselves. The original Xbox was dependent on an Intel processor which they did not have the same rights to and could not, for example, build it on a smaller or cheaper process as the console's life ran on.

I'd imagine that combining that, plus that the market for powerful number-crunching processors is slightly narrower now that IBM has taken itself out of the consumer processor game, would mean that they would not have many vendors to choose from for the CPU/GPU. ARM processors are coming along but I think they are still a ways out from the speculated performance of what is going into the next generation of consoles.

So was Intel even part of the tendering process for this new generation of consoles? Or could AMD jack up their margins knowing they were the only option?

As a PC gamer, I'm glad both consoles are going with x86 and AMD. I'd assume (please correct me) this will mean more console ports of higher quality for the PC given the shared architecture.

Secondly, I presume these massive contracts will keep AMD's CPU division in business for a while. Its been a long time since AMD had CPUs on par with Intel's performance but at least they'll remain in the desktop market space.

I thought the problem with the original Xbox was the nVidia GPU, and that it was nVidia that refused to do a process shrink.

It is rumored that Nvidia felt burned by the contract on the Xbox and they didn't want to bear the risk of a shrink.

My guess is because of the lower price, especially on the CPU side. Both Sony and Microsoft know this is not the golden age of consoles anymore, and no matter what they add in them, people are not going to want to pay a lot of money for them.

I think Nvidia won the design for Valve's own Steambox, though. Not sure what CPU they're using there. Maybe Intel? I have a feeling Valve won't care as much about the price, considering you get much cheaper games on Steam than on PS and Xbox, and he'd rather go for higher performance and launch it at a later date, too.

Would it not make sense for the Valve Steambox to run on ARM since they're cooperating with Nvidia (and just launched Steam for Linux?) I thought the Nvidia Tegra 3 was considered quite the powerful chip.

Porting games becomes much more difficult when thing's are running on a different architecture.

Is that an issue for modern games / engines? I would think most people who drop down to assembly also have a C level fallback - and people have been porting games to x64 from x86 already?

> Is that an issue for modern games / engines? I would think most people who drop down to assembly also have a C level fallback - and people have been porting games to x64 from x86 already?

Language doesn't matter so much as the API - you can write against DirectX for both the Xbox 360 and the PC, making appropriate changes. "Porting" to/from the [for example] PS3 is a much bigger ordeal.

Right, so since they're already running Steam and several high profile games on Linux, going for ARM should be aaaaalmost as easy as a recompile?

The ARM/Linux world is somewhat fragmented right now. There's vanilla ARM/Linux/glibc which has no drivers (vanilla Linux cannot use Android drivers). There's Android, which has drivers but has completely different APIs than desktop Linux. Then there's franken-Linux which tries to shim desktopish APIs on top of Android drivers. Which one should Steam target?

It's not like people are installing Linux on Android tablets all over the place and Valve needs to support those users. Valve doesn't need to worry about those devices. They only need to worry about the ones coming out with that Nvidia chip, for which Nvidia will definitely provide the drivers. So what you talked about is completely a non-issue here.

Then there's a question about how many months or years it would take Nvidia to definitely write those drivers. But yeah, if Valve wanted to lead the development of a new ecosystem at any cost I guess they could do it.