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Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

reuters.com

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#131
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Nvidia has powered a much more popular console... the Nintendo Switch, and Nvidia looks set to power the Switch 2 when it launches next year. So, AMD is clearly not the only choice.

The problem with choosing Nvidia is that they can't make an x86 processor with an integrated GPU. If you're looking to maintain backward compatibility with the Playstation 5, you're probably going to want to stick with an x86 chip. AMD has the rights to make x86 chips and it has the graphics chips to integrate. Nvidia has graphics chips, but it doesn't have the CPUs. Yes, Nvidia can make ARM CPUs, but they haven't be…

Nvidia has very little desire to make a high-end razor thin margin chip that consoles traditionally demand. This is what Jensen has said, and it makes sense when there are other areas that the silicon can be directed to with much greater profit.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#132
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you clearly haven't played a modern game :P cpu timings taken care around by developers is 10-15 years out of date. most of them these days dont even know what a dot product is, how to find the distance to a point or a straight line in-between two... and the people they rely on to do this for them make horrendous meals of it. but yeah, sure, cpu instruction timings matter.

I was about to say. I bailed out of the industry just as the Xbox One/Ps4 was coming in. Even with the 360/Ps3, it was considered wise to try and steer clear of that kind of low level stuff just for ones sanity. When the X1/Ps4 came in, it was completely abandoned, turns out x86 compilers combined with OoO execution just made that kind of tinkering not only nearly pointless but sometime actually hurt performance. Now…

There are still manual optimizations that can be done (non-temporal writes where appropriate for example), but nothing like the painstaking removal of Load-Hit-Stores and cache control of the 360/PS3 era.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#133
post #37

No one appears to have mentioned the important meta game going on: Intel bidding as a credible alternative supplier. For Intel, by bidding they get to undercut AMD's profits. For Sony, they get a credible alternative which they can pretend would be a viable choice. Thus forcing a slightly better deal from AMD. We saw similar articles related to the Switch 2. That time it was AMD acting as spoiler to Nvidia. Nvidia re…

I’m pretty sure PS5 runs x86 and Vulcan. Both are standardized. That’s why PS5 games can be easily ported to PCs running Intel and Nvidia.

So I’m not buying that going Intel would lose backwards compatibility.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel has Battlemage [1]. Presumably that would be the basis of the console APU. Their iGPU performance is actually getting good now. [2] [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/embargo-no-p... [2] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/lunar-lake-i...

The "Intel Core Ultra 7 258V" is at least 2-3x slower than the GPU within the PlayStation 5. It is not even close, and that's last gen. Again, the APUs within modern consoles compete with desktop grade GPUs. In the case of the PS5 its roughly comparable to an RTX 2070 or Rx 6700 (better analog).

GPUs can be scaled with more cores and higher bandwidth memory. I assume had Intel won the contract, they would have done so.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Different x86 micro-architectures benefit from writing the machine code in slightly different ways. Games are highly optimized to the specific micro-architecture of the console, so keeping that stable helps game developers optimize for the console. While that can be true, very few gamedev companies these days optimize to that degree. They almost all use off-the-shelf middleware and game engines that are built to su…

Asking this as an open ended (if leading) question: I assume enough people are doing it otherwise PS5 Pro makes no sense... Right? They (AMD/Sony) shoehorned the RDNA 3/3.5 GPU architecture onto an older Zen 2 core, with a different process node, because... they felt like making a frankenAPU? Especially since the APUs are usually monolithic (vs chiplet) in design and share a memory controller. Surely it would have be…

For PlayStation APUs, it's likely that AMD presents a menu of options and Sony chooses which components they want. For PS5 Pro, the CPU is unchanged from PS5 because Sony doesn't feel the need for anything faster. A newer CPU would take more area. But Sony really wanted better raytracing and AI so they chose RDNA 3.9 or whatever for the GPU. I suspect the cores are all mostly synthesized so they can support any process and Infinity Fabric is compatible enough that you can mix and match new and old cores.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#136
post #41
post #26

According to the writer everything in tech is AI. It bothers me and makes it difficult to take the article seriously. > Similar to how big tech companies like Google and Amazon rely on outside vendors to help design and manufacture custom AI chips > Having missed the first wave of the AI boom dominated by Nvidia and AMD, Intel reported a disastrous second quarter in August.

> It bothers me and makes it difficult to take the article seriously. But if you’re in the chip game AI is the big thing of the last 10 years. It’s driven a huge chunk of new sales and demand for upgraded choices than they likely would have seen otherwise. Having missed out on AI in many ways (nVidia was perfectly positioned, AMD better than Intel) they need stuff to keep growing. Their current business is looking sh…

> But if you’re in the chip game AI is the big thing of the last 10 years.

IMHO, AMD having done well despite being woefully unprepared for the recent AI wave suggests that AI is not the only big thing

(edit: grammar)

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#137
post #37

No one appears to have mentioned the important meta game going on: Intel bidding as a credible alternative supplier. For Intel, by bidding they get to undercut AMD's profits. For Sony, they get a credible alternative which they can pretend would be a viable choice. Thus forcing a slightly better deal from AMD. We saw similar articles related to the Switch 2. That time it was AMD acting as spoiler to Nvidia. Nvidia re…

I’m pretty sure PS5 runs x86 and Vulcan. Both are standardized. That’s why PS5 games can be easily ported to PCs running Intel and Nvidia. So I’m not buying that going Intel would lose backwards compatibility.

It’s not clear to me that the PS5 supports Vulkan at all (excluding third party translation layers). I would be happy to see any evidence. In any case I’m confident the large majority of PS5 games use its native api GNM.

GNM could certainly be implemented for Intel GPUs, but it’s an additional cost to account for.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#138
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No BC was attempted on PS4 at all, AFAIK. PS3 is a weird basketcase of an architecture, but even PS1 or PS2 aren't BC supported. To Be Faiiiirrrrrr, that whole generation was a basket case. Nintendo with the motion controls. Microsoft with a console that internally was more PC then "traditional" console (and HD-DVD). Sony with the Cell processor and OtherOS™. I do have fond memories of playing around with Linux on…

In what sense would you say the Xbox 360 was more "PC-like" than "console-like"?

I'll try to answer in the parent commenter's place.

Prior generations of consoles were true-blue, capital-E "embedded". Whatever CPU they could get, graphics hardware that was custom built for that particular machine, and all sorts of weird coprocessors and quirks. For example, in the last generation, we had...

- The PlayStation 2, sporting a CPU with an almost[0] MIPS-compatible core with "vertex units", one of which is exposed to software as a custom MIPS coprocessor, a completely custom GPU architecture, a separate I/O processor that's also a PS1, custom sound mixing hardware, etc.

- The GameCube, sporting a PPC 750 with custom cache management and vector instructions[1], which you might know as the PowerPC G3 that you had in your iMac. The GPU is "ATI technology", but that's because ATI bought out the other company Nintendo contracted to make it, ArtX. And it also has custom audio hardware that runs on another chip with it's own memory.

- The Xbox, sporting... an Intel Celeron and an Nvidia GPU. Oh, wait, that's "just a PC".

Original Xbox is actually a good way to draw some red lines here, because while it is in some respects "just a PC", it's built a lot more like consoles are. All games run in Ring 0, and are very tightly coupled to the individual quirks of the system software. The "Nvidia GPU" is an NV2A, a custom design that Nvidia built specifically for the Xbox. Which itself has custom audio mixing and security hardware you would never find in a PC.

In contrast, while Xbox 360 and PS3 both were stuck with PPC[2], they also both had real operating system software that commercial games were expected to coexist with. On Xbox 360, there's a hypervisor that enforces strict code signing; on PS3 games additionally run in user mode. The existence of these OSes meant that system software could be updated in nontrivial ways, and the system software could do some amount of multitasking, like playing music alongside a game without degrading performance or crashing it. Y'know, like you can on a PC.

Contrast this again to the Nintendo Wii, which stuck with the PPC 750 and ArtX GPU, adding on a security processor designed by BroadOn[3] to do very rudimentary DRM. About the only thing Nintendo could sanely update without bricking systems was the Wii Menu, which is why we were able to get the little clock at the bottom of the screen. They couldn't, say, run disc games off the SD card or update the HOME Menu to have a music player or friends list or whatever, because the former runs in a security processor that exposes the SD card as a block device and the latter is a library Nintendo embedded into every game binary rather than a separate process with dedicated CPU time budgets.

And then the generation after that, Xbox One and PS4 both moved to AMD semicustom designs that had x86 CPUs and Radeon GPUs behind familiar APIs. They're so PC like that the first thing demoed on a hacked PS4 was running Steam and Portal. The Wii U was still kind of "console-like", but even that had an OS running on the actual application processor (albeit one of those weird designs with fixed process partitions like something written for a mainframe). And that got replaced with the Switch which has a proper microkernel operating system running on an Nvidia Tegra SoC that might have even wound up in an Android phone at some point!

Ok, that's "phone-like", not "PC-like", but the differences in systems design philosophy between the two is far smaller than the huge gulf between either of those and oldschool console / embedded systems.

[0] PS2 floating-point is NOWHERE NEAR IEEE standard, and games targeting PS2 tended to have lots of fun physics bugs on other hardware. Case in point: the Dolphin wiki article for True Crime: New York City, which is just a list of bugs the emulator isn't causing. https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=True_Crime:_New...

[1] PPC 750 doesn't have vector normally; IBM added a set of "paired single" instructions that let it do math on 32-bit floats stored in a 64-bit float register.

[2] Right after Apple ditched it for power reasons, which totally would not blow up in Microsoft's face

[3] Which coincidentally was founded by the same ex-SGI guy (Wei Yen) who founded ArtX, and ran DRM software ported from another Wei Yen founded company - iQue.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#139
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure PS5 runs x86 and Vulcan. Both are standardized. That’s why PS5 games can be easily ported to PCs running Intel and Nvidia. So I’m not buying that going Intel would lose backwards compatibility.

It’s not clear to me that the PS5 supports Vulkan at all (excluding third party translation layers). I would be happy to see any evidence. In any case I’m confident the large majority of PS5 games use its native api GNM. GNM could certainly be implemented for Intel GPUs, but it’s an additional cost to account for.

Yes, you are correct. I was wrong.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#140

And they rightly deserve to lose the business to AMD. Intel to Apple: "We're too big to deliver what you want for cell phones." Apple: "Ok. We'll use ARM." Intel to Sony: "We're too big to commit to pricing, compatibility and volume." Sony:" Ok. We'll keep using AMD." It's interesting that Intel keeps trying to ship "features", some of arguable utility but others that are decently helpful, like AVX-512, that now AMD…

>Intel to Apple: "We're too big to deliver what you want for cell phones." Apple: "Ok. We'll use ARM." Reality: “We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it. The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chi…

The key in this quote is: "in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong"

100% intel screwup.

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