Some dataminers found an interesting job opening at Sony that could reflect that the company is once again following Microsoft’s lead in an industry change.
As shared by Puff in IconEra, Sony Japan has a new job listing for someone to help the company bring games to platforms with different architectures. The job listing itself is in Japanese, so we’ll share Puff’s translation below:
“Job Description(Roles & Responsibilities)
Develop systems to enable programs developed for our entertainment game consoles to run on game consoles with different architectures. Specifically, we will enable a large number of game titles developed for PlayStation to run on the new architecture system.
This system must be equipped with a mechanism to facilitate defect analysis in the event of problems.”
The job listing also indicates that applicants need to know the different CPU architectures, knowledge of C and C++, assembly language, speaking English, and using JIT/AOT. Knowledge of game engines like Unity and Unreal are also a plus.
As Puff explains, this description sounds a lot like Sony wants to switch from x64 to ARM64.
Now, we won’t dwell on the topic of CPU architectures or ISAs too much here. But there are more architectures out there than ARM64 and x64, and the game industry has switched around many kinds. The Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U all used PowerPC architecture to one extent or another (and may have cursed all of the aforementioned platforms to varying degrees.)
The push away from x64 to ARM64 is real, and it makes a lot of sense. While Microsoft was struggling to make x86-based Windows work on tablets, Google and hardware partners like Samsung successfully deployed the ARM-based Android OS to tablets successfully, and got them competing against Apple, which also happened to use ARM for their iOS.
Because of leaks during their efforts to acquire Activision, it became public that Xbox was investigating switching from x64 to ARM64 themselves. The leaked documents don’t confirm that Microsoft has decided on it yet. But, it would make sense for Xbox to do it, as the Windows and Surface team had already been working on making ARM-based Windows for their Surface tablets.
As we already know, the game industry already makes cross platform development tools to make it possible to port games across different systems. When we saw the Resident Evil 4 remake go from PC and consoles to iPad and iPhone, that game had to be modified to work on a different OS, CPU architecture and ISA.
Now some games have been programmed in such a way that porting them to different platforms is prohibitively expensive, if not technically impossible. But by and large, the video game industry is more than capable of switching from x64 to ARM64 completely, or at least normalize ARM64 moving forward. But first, we need to see if Microsoft and Sony really are making that switch in the next console generation. This is one of those races that both companies know they have to win.
