My initial response to this was “ehhh”, but a quick look at the consoles I grew up with shows you’re right. The only exception I saw was the PS3 thanks to it’s pretty bonkers CPU.
The Sega Genesis used a Motorola 68000, which was popular for Unix computers. It also made it into a number of PCs like the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, and Amiga
Even the PS5, which is for the most part is just an x86 PC, still has a unique architecture that allows for loading and decompressing textures from disk into VRAM without putting any load on either the CPU or GPU.
It’s not like they aren’t trying to do new stuff, it’s just hard to find new avenues to innovate when so much has already been figured out.
My initial response to this was “ehhh”, but a quick look at the consoles I grew up with shows you’re right. The only exception I saw was the PS3 thanks to it’s pretty bonkers CPU.
The Super Nintendo user a Ricoh 5A22, which was based on the W65C816S used in the Apple II.
The Sega Genesis used a Motorola 68000, which was popular for Unix computers. It also made it into a number of PCs like the Apple Lisa, Macintosh, and Amiga
The PS1 and PS2 both had a R3000A-compatible 32-bit RISC CPU that was used in a lot of workstations of the era, but none of those would be familiar to an x86 user.
The PS3’s processor was the stuff of hype and legends. It bore no resemblance to PCs of the time
I mean the military did buy up ps3s to make a supercomputer for this reason. Pretty cheap and performed well.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html
Even the PS5, which is for the most part is just an x86 PC, still has a unique architecture that allows for loading and decompressing textures from disk into VRAM without putting any load on either the CPU or GPU.
It’s not like they aren’t trying to do new stuff, it’s just hard to find new avenues to innovate when so much has already been figured out.