Comments on: EA Thinks Tablets Could Be More Powerful Than Consoles By 2018

By: MrSec84 .

MrSec84 . — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 11:21:00 +0000

It’s kind of already kind of happening against Wii U (Tegra X1 is there in performance, if it can run at 10 watts, but I think that’s still pretty high for mobile batteries), but I think it’ll take until at least 2020 to be able to reduce power consumption, but keep performance where XB1 and PS4 sit.

Basically if you believe this, you’re under the impression that a mobile chip will be able to exceed the performance of a 1.5-2.0TF APU (CPU & GPU compute perf) on less than a 10th of the energy each of those APUs requires to run.
Even if you completely ignore that all the parts in each console adds to the energy demands.

Another point that I always like to mention people bring out these kinds of claims is that when Tablet or small energy using processors gain such a level of efficiency so do bigger form factor chips.

If tablets get 10X+ more powerful in 3 years then so do consoles and PCs.

One other thing to bare in mind also is that as the parts on these bits of silicon shrink, it becomes harder and harder to keep up the momentum of gaining such better performance. Costs shoot up too, with bigger and bigger investments being needed in the Plants that make develop and make new processor scales.

If battery technology somehow is able to store a lot more energy then there’s also the issue of heat, tablets are tiny inside, they can’t really deal with any major heat levels, which will effect the life of such products.
Now if stuff like Solid State Drives, with the memory bandwidth, latency and life spans of RAM becomes available (which they are likely too), decent on-die memory pools for VRAM, essentially HBM like AMD is planning to use in their next line of GPUs becomes cheap (which it’s likely too), then that will definitely help with performance and power consumption.

I don’t think 2018 will be when this happens, it just doesn’t make logical sense from how tech improvements move, but a few years later, like when Nintendo Fusion, PS5 and XBox-Future/Next or whatever it ends up being called, in around 2020 we’ll probably start to see the evolution of the APU/SOC with PS4 levels of power for tablets.
By which time consoles will be using scaled up versions and PC will have models of chips even bigger on the high end gaming scene.

Just my 2 pence. 😉

By: Michael Norris

Michael Norris — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 02:38:00 +0000

The issue with mobile is bandwidth,the best looking games on Android/IOS looks like a good Xbox game with better shaders.Alpha effects are poor looking very cardboard like,i just don’t think in 3 years mobile games will run/look better than current consoles.Tablets/phones are very power efficient which is very bad for games,most games are 2D games that can run on sub $60 phones.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:35:00 +0000

Console gamers have to understand, and not get offended, that mobile games are raking in billions a year. What Satya said “mobile first, cloud first”. MS is well aware of mobile gaming, and trying to unify Win10 devices to attract developers for games n apps. Not the only reason they’re doin it but still. Remember Satya talkin about games being the lead in time spent, including mobile. So of course EA and others will talk like this.

Can both console and mobile games coexist, of course, if recent X1 and PS4 sales r any indication. As long as mobile games don’t take our developers away, they won’t, we’ll be good.

By: Googamp32

Googamp32 — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 21:13:00 +0000

Even IF tablets somehow become “more powerful than consoles”, which they won’t, but if they somehow did, what could you possibly play on them? Consoles also have controllers, are able to hook up to the television, don’t require batteries to work. All tablets can do is crappy touch-controlled shovelware. I’m sick and tired of everyone thinking that mobile will somehow kill consoles!