Whether you own a Nintendo Switch, a PS4 Pro, or an Xbox One, in many cases less than you think, traditional PCs are designed as general-purpose systems with the ability to add accelerators tailored to specific workloads, such as high-end GPUs. Because consoles fit into smaller spaces and are designed specifically for gaming, they can benefit from a higher level of component integration. Smartphones, game consoles, and PCs use a highly integrated processor called a SoC or system-on-chip. The SoC contains the actual CPU cores, the CPU L1 and L2 caches, the GPU, various ports (USB ports, hard drives), and a memory controller that connects other functional blocks to the main RAM.
Part of the system connects. In the past, these functions were usually distributed across multiple chips on the motherboard; Today they are integrated into a single functional block. The Nvidia GPU is on the left, the Cell Broadband Engine (CPU) is on the right, and the chip above the CBE is the South Bridge, which provides I/O connectivity. The processor's XDR RAM consists of four blocks to the right of the CBE. Compare this to the Xbox One. The reason is simple: the fewer chips there are on the board, the less complicated the routing becomes, and the fewer components you have to pay for installation.
The Xbox One While we focused on the Xbox One Switch with ARM architecture, all Xbox One and PS4 consoles (and their upgrades) are x86 processors that use a PC-derived graphics architecture. The only difference between Xbox, PS4, and PC is pretty much just the operating system and the features that the developer wants to make available to end users. With the Xbox Series, the question of backward compatibility of consoles between generations has so far been a purely individual matter. The PC is the only gaming system that has had a theoretically unbroken chain of support since the dark and dusty days of the command line.
Now things are changing. Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 launch with support for previous platforms. Furthermore, both are launching with the promise that this support will continue and will not disappear after a few years. Another big change coming with the next generation of consoles is that we will once again have hardware with large core processors. AMD's Jaguar has done a great job with the performance of the PS4 and Xbox One generations, but it's time to replace it with something faster, and the Ryzen cores at the heart of both systems promise significant increases in CPU performance.
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