Analysis of PS4's security and the state of hacking
Lots of good detail here. Raise your hand if you knew the switch to AMD would greatly benefit hacking vs custom, PPC chips. (raises hand) Now you know why I deployed security-focused stuff on PPC at one point. The economics of hacking alone work in your favor. :)<p>Personally, I think they should've tried to license Cavium's Octeon III processors: RISC (MIPS) ISA; 48 cores at 2.5GHz; many pre-made accelerator engines; huge I/O bandwidth. A royalty deal that made Cavium money for profit & continued R&D, while letting Sony have them cheap in PS4, would've made for one, badass gaming rig. Cavium might have had upgrades ready for PS5, too, given all the improvements they made going from Octeon II to III.<p>Everyone went with AMD instead. So, we get the real benefits of reuse of x86 code, low-costs, and reduced production issues. However, we also get all the black-boxes of risk in x86, a monoculture where an attack on AMD CPU's/firmware might break all game systems, inherent inefficiencies of x86, and lack of hardware differentiation (mainly accelerators) that developers can benefit from. Only time will tell if it was a good trade.