Xbox One X, PS4 Pro, X86, And The Downfall Of PC Gaming's Superiority

Just three years separated the release of the original PlayStation 4 in November 2013 and the PS4 Pro in November 2016. Microsoft has moved a little slower—four years between the Xbox One and Xbox One X this autumn—but that’s still pretty quick in the world of consoles, especially if you factor in the slim refreshes that appeared last year. As a reminder, there were seven years between the PS3 and PS4, and eight years between the Xbox 360 and One.

While the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X have substantially different innards from their predecessors, they can still run all of the same games, but usually at a lower resolution and with a few graphics toggles switched off. With previous console iterations this wasn’t usually possible—a new console meant entirely new CPU, RAM, storage—unless the console maker went through the pain of including backwards compatibility.

Now, though, the PlayStation and Xbox have finally ascended to x86—the one true architecture—and they’re reaping the benefits of a standardised, genericised, well-supported environment with lots of competitive players. There are still some hardware differences between these consoles and your desktop PC, but they’re relatively minor. If Microsoft or Sony want to boost their consoles’ performance, they simply buy a faster or larger x86-64 CPU from AMD or Intel. Ditto the graphics chip: just go and ask Nvidia or AMD for something with more cores, then slot it in.

This is a gross simplification, but it is essentially what Microsoft and Sony did with the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. For a relatively small investment (new industrial design, new logic board, some other small tweaks) they now have new, significantly differentiated products that can be sold at higher price points.

And they will do it again a few years from now. Everything will shuffle down the product stack: the Xbox One S will be a little cheaper; the Xbox One X will drop down to the £250/$300 price point currently occupied by the Xbox One S; and then there’ll be a new more powerful console at the top end, the xXbox One Xx.

I could be wrong; maybe Microsoft or Sony will go down another path eventually. But it seems unlikely, now that they’ve found themselves in the mid-range x86 sweet spot. It would be like Intel or AMD switching from x86-64 to a brand new architecture called Bitanium, because Bitanium is technically better than x86—but that would never happen because the x86 ecosystem is just so damn mature. A more likely scenario would be the console makers, perhaps in partnership with the chip makers, developing specialist extensions like SSE2 or AVX.