Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

Post by Meganet » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 12:37 PM UTC

jheriko wrote: post #66

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…

you clearly haven't played a modern game :P cpu timings taken care around by developers is 10-15 years out of date.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.

Post by lupusreal » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 1:36 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #71

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…

Adding a bit more context. Nvidia got the bid for Switch when they were basically dumping those unwanted Tegra to Nintendo for an incredibly low price. Xbox and Playstation dont earn AMD much profits at all. AMD had this Custom Processor segment to barely keep them surviving, people may forget AMD was only worth ~$3B market cap in 2016. They are now at ~$250B. On the subject of software compatibility though, one thin…

Post by lxgr » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 2:05 PM UTC

DSMan195276 wrote: post #144

lxgr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wi…

Post by zelon88 » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Sep 17, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

soganess wrote: post #127

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…

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…