schwifty wrote:I don't know either why Sony can't just put better hardware in that freakin box.
Economies-of-scale. Consoles will always lag. Credit Microsoft for putting a better GPU in the XBox One X, along with the AMD x86-64
'refit,' especially since Sony is leading sales, so they have no incentive to do so. Microsoft is 'crawling back' to Sony's volume with new sales, although they're still losing money in the division.
MS Office and a growing Azure Cloud (which uses Linux in its core, software defined infrastructure -- I have many, former Red Hat colleagues there now) is what keeps them well into the black. Credit Nadella for making Office 365 very competitive to Google. I pay for G-suite, and sometimes I wish Google took non-Chrome browsers on Linux as serious as Microsoft did.
Now it's going to get interesting once very powerful, Linux/aarch64 (ARMv8 aka ARM64) gaming systems show up early next decade.
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There are several ARM server chips out there now, and they are smacking Intel Xeon -- not just in power, but even performance. Several new supercomputers are sporting them, more power per rack at lower cost. Intel has lost both engineers and executives, including one very high profile executive, and their first product hit last year at a very low price point. I.e., Xeon is twice as much, twice as much, for no better performance.
AMD's ARM strategy hasn't really shown up, but I think once the nexgen consoles switch to AMD ARM+Radeon, we're going to see some serious efforts to take that from the Linux-based gaming console and put it into higher-end, but far more costly (as they are lower volume), systems. Steam and others will need to lead that charge, as ARMv8 is not x86-64 ISC compatible. But it will start on consoles.
Consoles have been all over the place. The N64 and PS/PS2 were MIPS, and similar to SGI-Cray architectures, while the original Xbox was basically a Pentium III. Then PS3 and XBox 360 were IBM Power architecture, the former with a dedicated, 7 unit vector ASIC and a single Power core, XBox 360 being triple core. But despite the economies-of-scale, IBM shut it down, forcing even Apple to switch to x86.
I was kinda shocked when the PS4 and XBox went x86-64, a pair of AMD Jaguar (later Puma in the refits) 4-core, dual BGA, units. It must have been something AMD and TSMC worked out in a deal. After all, consoles don't have to be as power-efficient as portables, which is why you don't see x86-64 in anything portable these days ... and Microsoft finally killed Windows for mobile this year (it was really dead 5 years ago).
Even Intel re-licensed ARM around 2016, after selling off its advanced ARM design (X-Scale, based on Digital StrongARM), in '06 to Marvell. Once ARM holdings started producing a superscalar ARMv7 (32-bit) and then v8 (64-bit), and Intel Atom was still in-line (to compete with ARM), it was over. The superscalar Atom was slower than an i-series core run at low clocks, same power, and both still lost to ARM on power-performance.
The SteamOS and Linux worlds are changing the need for x86-64 compatibility. It's been that way on the server forever, Alpha used to smack everything else silly, Power does as well, but they aren't economies-of-scale. But now we're seeing 64+ core, 64MiB L3 cache, supercomputer ARM chips that destroy Intel Xeons ... especially as compiler optimizations are made.
That will translate into consoles, and then dedicated, high performance gaming consoles. The 2020s will be when x86-64 dies. 7nm ARM is already out at TSMC, and Intel is having trouble getting below 10nm. x86-64 is just a PITA for timing closer and tape-out, even though RISC86 cores are used (microcode breaks down x86 CISC into actual RISC used in-layout).
schwifty wrote:They care too much for casual gamers on budget I think.
Smart business, the money is in the titles, not the hardware.
They always lose money on the hardware the first 2-3 years.
Microsoft is still losing money in their console unit, always has.
They really fell behind in PS4 v. XBox One, even though they are almost the exact same hardware.
And when you're behind, you end up making a much better console, like the XBox One X is, unlike the PS4 Pro (or the prior XBox One S).
schwifty wrote: I wouldn't bother laying down 2k for an adequate gaming console working perfectly out of the box without having to struggle with all you have to when building a gaming pc.
That's what Valve is trying to do. Credit Microsoft for 'strong-arming' game houses to force them to release via the Microsoft Store, and botching it so bad, everyone ran back to Steam. Because the second Microsoft did that, Valve immediately released their internal Linux work. Why?
They 'held back' on doing so, because Microsoft would have attempted to stomp on them, just like they did to Corel prior.
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Adobe quickly learned that lesson when it yanked all Linux software releases in the late '90s. But when Microsoft moved to actually destroy them, Valve was ready, and Microsoft wasn't. So now Linux gaming is here, and it doesn't have to be on x86-64. It can be on ARM. Things port very, very well on Linux, unlike Windows.
Heck, 80% of Microsoft's own, existing libraries won't port to native 64-bit Windows on x86-64 (don't get me started), let alone another architecture. Nadella has attacked that head-on, and complete brought the edict down since 2015 or so ... you must write all new code to work on Azure, and if that means you have to re-write libraries to make it work on non-x86/32-bit, like Linux/x86_64 and Linux/aarch64, you're re-writing libraries. Azure gets priority.
And once it's written to be portable, it can move off of x86-64 too. GNU/Linux has not only been portable since inception of my colleague Tiemann's cross-compiler work on GCC in the '90s, but 64-bit clean ever since Digital sent Linux Alphas in the early '90s. Every architecture has benefitted since then.
schwifty wrote: ut seems I'm a minority. As a sysadmin, the (other) primary use of my workstation is actually just terminals and browser
Which is all what most people need, whether personal or professional. Microsoft recognized this by putting a lot of money into Office 365. And they focused on working on non-Windows platforms. It was so good that even Red Hat considered Office 365 over G-Suite when they first evaluated it 5 years ago.
No joke.
schwifty wrote:while putting a ~800W psu and a RTX2080Ti is quite more insane.
But you actually don't need that. In fact, beyond the CPU, PCIe is really a result of Intel's crap-poor system interconnect. There are much lower power system interconnect which, when combined with the CPUs with the GPUs on the same, system interconnect, would cut power quite significantly.
Don't get me wrong, the GPU on its own will still suck up a lot. But a lot of the support chips are due to Intel not knowing how to design an interconnect, but API Networks did for AMD. Alpha Processor Inc (API), it lives on.
The recent rash of security vulnerabilities, which affected Intel the most, is because they have so many freaking hacks to make their TLB work for cache coherency, because they never designed a real system interconnect, and relied on 'shared busses' forever.
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AMD still has to deal with the ISA-level aspects, so they are affected to, but not in their native, 48-bit/52-bit PAE (x86-64 "Long Mode" is 48-bit addressing, 52-bit Processor Address Extensions aka "paging") natively.
Intel has never designed anything well. Digital (Alpha team) actually had to redesign the Pentium's ALU, hence where the Pentium Pro came from (and the Digital-Intel lawsuit as well), which is their ALU in everything now. They survive on Windows compatibility, that's it.
schwifty wrote:Anyway, I read that the odyssey is bulkier and kinda has software bugs, but better image quality? Pimax seems to be also not really the big shit.
HTC is a no-go for me, not at least because I don't intend to walk around. It's sufficient I can look back / around in the ship.
I'm still picking hardware. Mostly trouble with planning air-flow and dimensions of components cause I'd rather like to have a mATX board/case.
That's what I'd call an oddyssey
I assemble Mini-ITX (really Mini-DTX, 2-slot case, with Mini-ITX board).
That way I'm mega-portable.
SilverStone makes quality 600-650W SFX SFF power supplies, and that's enough to power a ~100W CPU and ~250W GPU, plus some SSDs and 2.5" hybrid SSHDs. I have five (5) drives in my system, 2TB NAND SSD + four (4) 2TB hybrid SSHDs in RAID-10.