> The Xbox 360 doubled down on this while the PS3 tried to do clever things with an innovative architecture.
I don't think this is really an accurate description of the 360 hardware. The CPU was much more conventional than the PS3, but still custom (derived from the PPE in the cell, but has an extended version of VMX extension). The GPU was the first to use a unified shader architecture. Unified memory was also fairly novel in the context of a high performance 3D game machine. The use of eDRAM for the framebuffer is not novel (the Gamecube's Flipper GPU had this previously), but also wasn't something you generally saw in off-the-shelf designs. Meanwhile the PS3 had an actual off the shelf GPU.
These days all the consoles have unified shaders and memory, but I think that just speaks to the success of what the 360 pioneered.
Since then, consoles have gotten a lot closer to commodity hardware of course. They're custom parts (well except the original Switch I guess), but the changes from the off the shelf stuff are a lot smaller.
I don't think this is really an accurate description of the 360 hardware. The CPU was much more conventional than the PS3, but still custom (derived from the PPE in the cell, but has an extended version of VMX extension). The GPU was the first to use a unified shader architecture. Unified memory was also fairly novel in the context of a high performance 3D game machine. The use of eDRAM for the framebuffer is not novel (the Gamecube's Flipper GPU had this previously), but also wasn't something you generally saw in off-the-shelf designs. Meanwhile the PS3 had an actual off the shelf GPU.
These days all the consoles have unified shaders and memory, but I think that just speaks to the success of what the 360 pioneered.
Since then, consoles have gotten a lot closer to commodity hardware of course. They're custom parts (well except the original Switch I guess), but the changes from the off the shelf stuff are a lot smaller.