[thatjoeoverthr]

The PS3 is one of a handful of systems that actually had a special processor. The NES and Genesis had common desktop CPUs. The PS1, 2 and N64 had MIPS processors which were in heavy use in workstations. GC, Wii, Xbox 360 had PowerPC. What was unusual was a special and temporary period from the 90s where “pc = x86 = basic” because everything else one way or another failed out of the market. That moment is passed and today all basic activity is done on arm based phones. Gaming is now one of the main niches of the x86, along with servers and corporate desktop. The special feature of the game console was always “we made these standards, we will commit to them for five years and sell a lot of units for you to ship games on.”

[mort96]

To my knowledge, all consoles until the Xbox 360 had normal CPUs, but very special graphics hardware. They were decidedly not typical PC hardware.

[thatjoeoverthr]

This more-or-less ended with 3D. The N64, mid-90s, had a novel 3D accelerator (heavily programmable, a kind of a proto-GPU). Its successor went with ATI. The Dreamcast had a PowerVR, which you could buy for your PC, and early iPhones had as well. Xbox had Nvidia. It has always been normal to find OTS parts. Never "IBM PC compatible" but again, the bubble itself is part of the core value proposition.

Honestly, we're dating ourselves with the premise.

There is exactly one generation (mid-90s) where the 3D accelerator design and industry hadn't stabilised. 3D then was like AI today. It was the rising thing. I wrote my first vertex shader on a GeForce 2.

They have common, off the shelf parts because it just isn't where the action is in 2026.