From a technical perspective we have ARM based chips already being scaled up to the point where they can (tablets) and will (Windows 8 ARM) support a home computing style environment with the chips. Unlike say 7-8 years ago as Nintendo was finalising the Wii, we have powerful ARM chips and supporting graphics and media decoding hardware which is more than suitable for installing in a home console which is targetting <25W overall power consumption.
So given the known fact that ARM chips are small, compact and the supporting components are likewise small and compact whilst by default they include nothing that isn't useful for a home console and exclude nothing which is useful, how would that work out from a technical and software eco-system perspective? It already appears on the surface that the cost of console development and the royalty costs as well as the overall performance levels already point to their using ARM as their chipset as it seems that ARM systems are the closest to supporting their Wii philosophy of small, simple and low power systems with high per unit margins. With so much development in this area they may be able to effectively take a design off the shelf and implement it without too much hassle.
Can they produce a system which can take modern day console games, reproduce them at a slightly higher level of overall performance and offer backwards compatibility in a system which is more cost efficient and power efficient than AMD's Fusion based processors on both 40nm and 28nm or anything IBM has? We've already seen Sony talk up how easy it is to port from the PS3 to ARM though im sure they spent a lot of time developing tools for just that. So it may indeed be possible to emulate ancient PowerPC hardware on the fly given an 11 year time period between releases.
So given the known fact that ARM chips are small, compact and the supporting components are likewise small and compact whilst by default they include nothing that isn't useful for a home console and exclude nothing which is useful, how would that work out from a technical and software eco-system perspective? It already appears on the surface that the cost of console development and the royalty costs as well as the overall performance levels already point to their using ARM as their chipset as it seems that ARM systems are the closest to supporting their Wii philosophy of small, simple and low power systems with high per unit margins. With so much development in this area they may be able to effectively take a design off the shelf and implement it without too much hassle.
Can they produce a system which can take modern day console games, reproduce them at a slightly higher level of overall performance and offer backwards compatibility in a system which is more cost efficient and power efficient than AMD's Fusion based processors on both 40nm and 28nm or anything IBM has? We've already seen Sony talk up how easy it is to port from the PS3 to ARM though im sure they spent a lot of time developing tools for just that. So it may indeed be possible to emulate ancient PowerPC hardware on the fly given an 11 year time period between releases.