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Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

reuters.com

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Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#141

Post by FileSorter »

mdasen wrote: post #31
coder543 wrote: post #18

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…

>The problem with choosing Nvidia is that they can't make an x86 processor with an integrated GPU

Can't and not being allowed are two very different things

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#142

Post by tacticus »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #94
deaddodo wrote: post #68

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…

How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5? e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5. If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences. (I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)

> Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5.

not being expected to run with variable refresh rate\interleaving and accepting 30\60 fps in best case situations?

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#143

Post by deelowe »

xcv123 wrote: post #63
deelowe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it's very likely next gen consoles will feature AI hardware. The PS5 pro is already touting it.

The GPU is "AI hardware", and current PS5 already has it.

That's a bit reductionist.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#144

Post by DSMan195276 »

lxgr wrote: post #109
Danieru wrote: 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…

> Sony and Nintendo would be fools to give up backwards compatibility just for savings on chips. But would they really? Staying on x86-64 would take care of CPU compatibility (unless there's some exotic AMD-only instruction set extension heavily used by PS4/5 games), and a GPU emulation stack seems at least somewhat plausible. Sony has pulled this off multiple times before with seemingly completely incompatible archi…

For GPU emulation, I'm not super knowledgeable but I would think the shaders are a big issue, older systems don't have that problem. Console games come with precompiled shaders and you won't be able to reuse those between AMD vs. Nvidia. Certainly you can get around it, emulators for modern Console do just that, but it's not without it's issues which might be considered unacceptable.

That's still fixable if you're willing to ship newly compiled shaders and such, but that's a lot more work if you're talking about needing some kind of per-game fix to be downloaded. This is how the XBox 360 "Backwards-compatibility" works, and this approach means it only works with a subset of XBox 360 games, not all of them. It's much better than nothing, but it's not a hardware-level fix that makes the original game binaries "just work".

For packaging the old GPU with the new system, I think that's not really realistic anymore since prices for them simply don't drop enough and the system design would be a mess (the chips are huge and you'd need cooling for both chips. I guess if only one is running at a time then it's not as bad, but...). Separately, if you're swapping from Nvidia to AMD then you're talking about trying to convince one of them to make a batch of old chips for you while you use their competitor's chip as the the main one, they might not be willing to do it.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#146

Post by anemic »

bangaladore wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm misinformed, but I could never see Intel getting this contract. AMD has extensive experience with high-performing APUs, something Intel, at least in my memory, does not have. The chips on modern high-end consoles are supposed to compete with GPUs, not with integrated graphics. Does Intel even have any offerings that would indicate they could accomplish this? Intel has ARC, which presumably could be put in a…

Maybe the deal went south because Intel wanted it to be called Playstation 6 with Intel Integrated Graphics.

And with a sticker on the front, of course.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#147

Post by HelloNurse »

deaddodo wrote: post #68
senkora wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. An important non-obvious detail for AMD is that they (at least in the past, I assume for this as well) have kept the instruction timings similar from generation to generation of consoles. 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 optim…

> 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…

And, more simply, Moore's Law should ensure that in a next-generation console with a new microprocessor architecture slowdown in some instructions and memory access patterns is compensated by general speedup, limiting performance regressions to terribly unfortunate cases (which should be unlikely and so obvious that they are mitigated).

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#148

Post by onli »

windowsrookie wrote: post #81
Scramblejams wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their iGPU performance is actually getting good now. I've only been waiting for Intel to ship a compelling iGPU since, I dunno, their "Extreme Graphics" in 2001? What on earth have their iGPU teams been doing over there for the last 20+ years? I guess the OEMs were blinkered enough not to demand it, and Intel management was blinkered enough not to see the upside on their own.

The Intel Iris Pro graphics from about 10 years ago were actually ok. I believe they were matching the lower-end dedicated laptop GPUs of that era. The problem was Apple was the only company willing to pay for the Iris Pro Chips.

Those even were on the desktop, for a very short while, with the broadwell processor i5-5675C and i7-5775C.They were stronger than the FM2+-Apus AMD had released earlier, that Intel otherwise could not beat for years, just weaker than the following Ryzen Apus.

Ofc gone in the next generation. But those widely available might have changed things.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#149

Post by silvestrov »

fhdsgbbcaA wrote: post #55
tester756 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This is from the horses mouth, and reliable as such. However, it does give the impression that they weren’t sufficiently interested to think more creatively about cost optimization, because they were riding the gravy train of Wintel ruling the world. So I think root comment isn’t too far off.

> no one knew what the iPhone would do

When you are the CEO of Intel you should be able to see/forecast what smartphones would do in the market.

The iPhone wasn't completely new. Nokia already had some "little smart" phones on the market already.

The only real surprise was Apple's ability to get a US phone company on board with selling the iPhone and losing grip on what software that was installed on the phones.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#150

Post by ac29 »

jitl wrote: post #99
MichaelZuo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you explain cross PS5/PC releases being much more efficient on the PS5? e.g. Horizon Forbidden West needing a much better GPU on PC to run at the same level of fidelity as the PS5. If not for special tuning specific to the PS5’s differences. (I can imagine Windows bloat and other junk requiring an additional 10% to 20%, but not 30% to 50%.)

The comment above is elaborating on x86 micro-architecture, the differences between how the CPU handles x86 instructions specifically. The overall system architecture is different between PC, which has discrete memory systems for the CPU and GPU, and a very long pathway between GPU memory and system/CPU memory, versus today's consoles which have unified memory for CPU+GPU, and optimized pathways for loading from pers…

> Usually PC ports of console native games re-implement the rendering engine using the PC graphics APIs like DirectX or Vulkan. The re-implementation is probably less efficient and less tuned.

This was true 25 years ago when in house bespoke game engines were more common and consoles weren't basically PCs. In 2024, I highly doubt many cross-platform games are ported at all - its just a different target in Unreal/Unity/etc.

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