Architecture of Consoles

Thanks for sharing, but please bear in mind that this, as a ‘series’, is currently in the process.

For this reason, people have previously shared individual articles instead in hackernews.

I've heard that the PS3 architecture is pretty wacky. I'm curious just how many games managed to actually utilize it to full potential vs. a more typical architecture.

Some really interesting details in here, presented in a very accessible way. I wasn't aware of how earlier consoles used (effectively) pulses of static noise to create drums, although it seems obvious now I've read that!

Impressive!

Looking forward to PS3 (the Cell CPU was really interesting there) and Xbox 360 (multiple innovations about GPU: GPU being a memory controller, unified shader cores, and eDRAM).

I love this blog and I discovered it because of how frequently it's posted here on HN so thank you all!

What was the purpose of this article? It was just a list of game consoles and some of their technical features. Was there something groundbreaking the feature provided? A new or better paradigm? Something even more basic?

Just had a quick look and for a guide that repeated describes itself as “in depth” it seems to only focus on the biggest 4 names in consoles: Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft and PlayStation. It even misses out Atari. Plus there isn’t even every console from those big 4 companies within the time periods it focuses on.

It also includes portables with the home console generations and that’s not how people generally discuss portables.

It starts off at the 3rd generation of consoles (there’s a whole era of gaming that predates the “crash”).

And lastly it’s also very American specific (eg talking about “the crash” which was an American phenomena and didn’t affect Europe nor Japan).

In short, it’s a good start but it’s a looooong way off being in-depth.