Didn't anyone miss the first part of Fishys comment?

x86

The Xbox 360 didn't use x86 it used a custom made Power PC core made by IBM. It wasn't x86 at all.

Now I do give the 360 props for making a system that was easy to develop for.

Development was made even easier when both Sony and Microsoft decided to use x86 since that's an architecture that almost all game developers are familiar with due to its use in almost every aspect of PC gaming. Not to mention having a unified memory structure made things even better for developers.

Edit: I just did a bit of research and I just found out that the 1st Xbox used x86. On a side note it's interesting how Microsoft used PowerPC with the 360 and reverted back to x86 with the Xbox One.

@Captain

"The ps4 is proof you can make good hardware and also appease game developers."

And the Xbox One was proof of the opposite in the beginning. But it appears that both manufacturers have learned from their mistakes with hardware and won't be repeating it in the future.

"The ps3 still hurts Sony to this day."

True. But thankfully the PS4 rectified most of those mistakes with the PS3. The PS5 will probably be fully BC with the PS4 for example.

@cornhole... you really didnt know the og xbox was x86? I think most everyone knows that. And the custom PPC in the 360 was also capable of supporting x86 instructions as well.

They monopolized architecture with their only blood flow in life... computing?
That’s not right, that’s demanding to control for self preservation

I do agree. Apocalypse Shadow - Sony had Blu ray storage advantage on PS3 where their first party had a lot more animations and detail - content in levels at the end of a gen, but the whole 7th gen was delayed muddy ports due to Cell and split memory, slow network and downloads. Even saving put you out of a game. Controller was light with loose sticks and loading or installing games was hideous.
They learned a lot and PS4 is fantastic. Only thing left now is to bring more effective cooling to the system and with tightening other features, we will have great ps5.

@captain

Directx, which is what I'm assuming Darth is referring to, is needed for higher level programming which isnt common on consoles. It's great for PC, because it removes a lot of barriers for the pc dev. Anyone who grew up in the DOS days remembers boot disks, and the devs had to write those hardware drivers, which didnt always work.

But any system can be made to work, and predominately, there are two formats that get used. X86, or powerpc, and devs of modest skill should be able to go from one to the other. Even all those special chips through the years were typically based in 8080, 8086(x86), or variants of powerPC. What made those chips unique is what made them special, and allowed the devs to do things that they couldn't do otherwise.

Modern consoles are more like pc, but the devs handle the programming much differently, and while x86 does allow for a good number of set commands to follow, it's not any harder or easier than other formats. Things like CELL were difficult because they used a completely different programming paradigm, which was amazing for when it came out, but devs wanted it easy...apparently at least. In the end, they learned CELL paradigms for GPU compute, just that the hardware calls are different, and the timing is not as crucial

Then directx for xbox isnt much different than what sony has available for pc. Different routines for various things, and different rendering process, but overall, you code for the two consoles differently.

Of course, if a dev is using a game engine then that handles a lot of the direct to hardware coding, so the only real change is what assembly calls they'd make with regard to the cpu architecture.

Split memory wasn't really that out of the ordinary when PS3 released. It's actually still the common way things are on PC...albeit PC games don't use as much memory management as that's done by the OS...and many game systems had split memory before the PS3 came out including the PS1 and PS2. I wouldn't say it was helpful, but it wasn't harmful. Even as late as last gen, Video memory was usually faster than system memory, which is why it was split, because video memory is faster, so you could have less, but faster memory.

Fun fact though. Discrete split memory on PC is actually better than unified memory, because a game can utilize DMA to video memory if it's programmed to do so with the new Vulcan or DX API's. While it always could, new DX and Vulcan allow for this direct access without the higher level input that the OS requires for memory management. While a GPU can use low level access to the system memory for graphics in new API's, it's still managed by the OS, which slows it down a bit. So, with discrete memory, it's advantageous to have split memory as GPU memory is generally a lot faster than system memory due to it's nature.