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AMD-HBM

In that location's a rumor making the rounds that AMD is prepping new solutions for Sony and Microsoft with an estimated 2022 release date and up to 5x improved functioning-per-watt. Sony and Microsoft haven't said much about these plans (and won't, to avert cannibalizing sales of existing platforms), but that doesn't stop united states of america from examining them. Could we run across new hardware in-market by that appointment?

Nosotros could — merely there are significant questions almost how the market would react to it. If you plot game console releases over fourth dimension, the Xbox 360 and PS3 were clear outliers, at 8 years and seven years, respectively. The historical tendency going back to the original Nintendo NES has been a 4-6 year cadence. The trouble with a release cycle this fast, however, is that game evolution cycles now take longer than they used to, and you run the adventure of alienating gamers who dropped meaning cash on a platform they thought would last as long as the Xbox 360 / PS3 cycle did.

The other major question is one of technology. In the past, console engineering tended to leap forwards relatively quickly — compare the development of Lara Croft from her earliest appearance on the PlayStation to the 2022 title, Tomb Raider.

The evolution of Lara Croft.

The evolution of Lara Croft. Click to enlarge.

In this diagram, the first 3 versions of Lara are from the PS1 era, the 4th is the PS2, and five-seven are the PS3. The last is the PS4 version of the Tomb Raider reboot. Is this concluding Lara better than the versions that appeared on the PS3? Objectively, yes — the character model is more detailed, her clothes have better textures and more realistic wrinkles, and her pare tone is much improved. Go on in mind, nonetheless, that the PS3 had a 7-year lifespan, from 2006 to 2022. It's therefore fair to ask if the model of Lara Croft from the PS4 era is as dramatic an comeback over the PS3 version as the PS3 version (2006) is compared to Lara in Tomb Raider: The Concluding Revelation? (1999).

The answer, obviously, is no. Tomb Raider Legend'due south Lara has a rectangular cervix, an actual square jaw, and a square stomach. Part of the problem with these kind of judgments (and i reason why the PS4 and Xbox One don't look like huge leaps over the final generation) is that there'due south a diminishing marginal return from calculation more polygons. Compare the models beneath — each one contains 10x the triangles of the previous.

polygon-count-diminishing-returns-consoles

The diminishing render of higher polygon counts.

The gap between 600 and 6000 triangles is much larger than the gap between 6,000 and 60,000. As improvements get more subtle and fine-grained, they become more difficult to notice. In that location are other ways that games can apply more than avant-garde hardware, of grade, like increasing map sizes, cutting load times, or improving shadows and lighting in a title, but we see diminishing marginal returns in these areas every bit well.

In other words: The chance that shifting upwardly to a new generation of consoles in 2022 will provide a greater improvement over the PS4 and Xbox One than those consoles show over the PS3 and Xbox 360 is relatively pocket-size.

The integration counter-argument

There'southward a counter-argument to be made hither, even so. The PS4 and Xbox One are non particularly aggressive in terms of their technologies or hardware. Microsoft and Sony could've built more powerful hardware than they actually shipped in 2022, and they could opt to reposition themselves more aggressively on the cost/functioning curve with next-gen hardware. High Bandwidth Memory, or HBM, is a major game-changing applied science over existing GDDR5, and by 2022 AMD should have no problem building it into an APU-style device.

HBM-4

Integrating HBM into an APU would offer a huge functioning increase.

A panel equipped with HBM could offer huge amounts of memory bandwidth — iv-8x every bit much every bit the current PS4 or Xbox 1. If Samsung and TSMC keep their foundry schedules, meanwhile, they should exist building chips on 10nm engineering science by that indicate. Flash memory should also be inexpensive enough to use it equally primary storage, skipping difficult drives entirely and adopting solid-land retention for the entire console. Backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and PS4 could exist easily accomplished if the ii companies keep an x86 CPU in their respective platforms. Fifty-fifty if they prefer ARM, an ARM + GCN-derived GPU would be a better emulation platform than trying to imitate Prison cell or the Xbox 360. Microsoft may have gotten the latter working, merely Eurogamer'southward coverage of the adequacy indicates mixed results. (Fallout three, however, apparently runs quite well).

The other statement in favor of a short panel bicycle is this: Microsoft and Sony arguably missed some of the major technological trends of the terminal few years because they focused on coming to market in 2022 with relatively small-scale hardware. There's no promise of gaming in 4K on either console (at least, not in a AAA championship). Neither platform incorporates 4K Blu-ray back up, and neither is designed to employ college-speed NAND flash every bit opposed to conventional hard drives. Sony is working on a VR solution, but neither the PS4 nor the Xbox One take the hardware to actually support VR experiences the way top-end PCs can. Rather than trying to shoe-horn these capabilities into existing hardware, it may exist simpler to start from scratch.

The long and short is this: It's possible that Microsoft and Sony could be looking ahead to a 2022 refresh cycle precisely because the technology expected to be available at that point offers enough potential to evangelize a truthful generational gain, even if the industry as a whole is subject to diminishing marginal return. If goose egg else, a further incremental boost over the existing Xbox One / PS4 would finally deliver gains well above even the best of the PS3 / Xbox 360 era. lx FPS @ 1080p would exist an easy target for either company, and 30 FPS @ 4K should be plausible, even on relatively limited console hardware.

Given the source of this rumor, we'd take it with a huge grain of common salt — but it's non incommunicable that Microsoft and Sony are working on new hardware for a 2022 – 2022 timeframe.