medi01IBM willingness to do PC and Jobs' greediness is the reason why x86 is a thing.
Oh, and IBM would not have picked up lolwhatwhohaveheardaboutthiscompany Intel, if not AMD (that's why both co-existed in x86 space in the first place).

This isn't a debate about how x86 came to be something, it's about how x86 is part of the reason why modern day gaming consoles can be backwards compatible.

medi01Instruction set doesn't matter at all, it's about sticking with one architecture,, whatever it is.

What the heck are you talking about? The instruction set(s) always influence architecture. There are demands for certain extensions that things exists or work in a particular way. For example, 64-bit extentions to x86 don't merely call for increased address register widths, they call for additional registers as well. Instruction sets and the way they're designed directly impacts CPU architecture because those instructions are the very thing you need your CPU to do quickly and efficiently. Sure, there are some fundamental similarities between CPUs like the need for a memory controller, or the requirement of at least one ALU, or the requirement of a bus that enables these thing to communicate but, when it comes down to implementation, the instruction set dictates the design of the CPU because you're not writing an instruction set around a CPU, you're building a CPU around an instruction set.

So, now that you've properly derailed the direction this should have been going, regardless of history, x86 is still a reason why it's backwards compatible and how CPUs are designed is completely beside the point.

medi01CELL was a major disaster for Sony, weirdo CPU (1 normal core, 8 vector cores, go multi-platform for it) for R&D of which Sony alone spent 4 billion $.

Cell was Sony's Bulldozer. "Here, have a bunch of parallel throughput but, when it comes to coordination and serial tasks, good luck buddy." It was like forcing game developers to write their games mostly using GPGPU compute. It's great if hardware cost less than devs but, devs aren't exactly cheap either and are a recurring cost. The world is familiar with x86, which makes it that much easier to adopt and use.

medi01Floating Point Operations Per Second (which GPUs can crunch plenty, unlike CPUs), which "per execution unit" did you read between which lines?

The workload has everything to do with it. What GPUs are intended to do and what CPUs are intended to do are very different. Sure, being general purpose machines, they can solve any Turing complete problem but, that isn't to say that a generic measurement accurately describes the behavior of the kind of workload that will primarily be used on that device. FLOPS makes sense when we're talking about parallel compute where time isn't a factor and the kind of code that's always running is predictable but, not when we're trying to describe something that must be responsive in the real world, where several different things are happens in consort. Such a thing would require some measure of latency, not strictly bandwidth or throughput which is what FLOPS describes.
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tl;dr: The world knows x86, therefore backwards compatibility is relatively easy despite any history and comparing GPUs and CPUs with the same measure is dumb because they're doing very different workloads, so why would the same workload that's used to describe both be a good idea to describe how they do different things?[/INDENT]

AquinusThis isn't a debate about how x86 came to be something, it's about how x86 is part of the reason why modern day gaming consoles can be backwards compatible.

You missed the point.
It doesn't matter which instruction set it is, we've seen Sony jumping from wagon to a wagon every generation.
Important is, that it is an instruction set they COULD stick with, because CPUs that support it are actively developed AND fast enough.

Second thing is, if you even admit that actual instruction set matters (no, it doesn't, but let's pretend) x86 got where it is because of both IBM and AMD. (lot's of markets would be closed to Intel, if it was the only manufacturer of things, and nobody would care about Intel's existence, if IBM would choose other supplier for IBM PC)

And last, but not least, even with AMD's alleged low margins PS4 costs close to it's manufacturing costs, it wouldn't be possible to roll out PC like consoles with Intel/nVidia chips at a reasonable price, without sacrificing performance.

Basically with AMD's APUs we got perfect storm, that carried away both Sony and Microsoft.

PS
Flops argument is also missing the point and frankly boring, I won't even bother answering.

"Scorpio". Lol can we be honest with ourselves and just admit that this will be the XBOX Two?

It is launching 4 years after the failed XBOX just like 360 did.