Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to 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 chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

They’re getting better. But as the article mentions backwards compatibility is a huge lock in factor. It’s way easier for AMD to achieve it than it would be for Intel (or anyone else) following the PS5.

> Nvidia has graphics chips, but it doesn't have the CPUs. Yes, Nvidia can make ARM CPUs, but they haven't been putting out amazing custom cores.

Ignorant question - do they have to? The last time I was up on gaming hardware it seemed as though most workloads were GPU-bound and that having a higher-end GPU was more important than having a blazing fast CPU. GPUs have also grown much more flexible rendering pipelines as game engines have gotten much more sophisticated and, presumably, parallelized. Would it not make sense for Nvidia to crank out a cost-optimized design comprising their last-gen GPU architecture with 12 ARM cores on an affordable node size?

The reason I ask is because I've been reading a lot about 90s console architectures recently. My understanding is that back then the CPU and specialized co-processors had to do a lot of heavy lifting on geometry calculations before telling the display hardware what to draw. In contrast I think most contemporary GPU designs take care of all of the vertex calculations themselves and therefore free the CPU up a lot in this regard. If you have an entity-based game engine and are able to split that object graph into well-defined clusters you can probably parallelize the simulation and scale horizontally decently well. Given these trends I'd think a bunch of cheaper cores could work as well for cheaper than higher-end ones.

Backward compatibility guarantees is a significant one, I think. A lot of the QA process for console games is predicated on testing against a fixed set of hardware configurations, and various race conditions and other weirdness can start crawling out of the woodwork even with modest changes. This has been seen on many games running on emulators, on hacked console firmwares that allow overclocking (e.g. by running the CPU at the "native" clock speed in backward compatibility mode), or with framerate unlocking patches.

This is all true. Xbox always threatens to leave their current vendors only to end up signing a renewal at the final hours of the contract.

>As a gamedev I have a different perspective: Sony and Nintendo would be fools to give up backwards compatibility just for savings on chips.

In your view, is this issue worse with modern consoles now that the Playstation (and possibly Nintendo) online store purchases persist across generations? Imagine a scenario where someone has a PS4 and PS5, they buy many games through the Playstation Store, then Sony selects a different chip supplier for the PS6. I'm guessing this would cause issues with games that were designed for the older consoles, breaking backwards compatibility.

I'd imagine that if the console manufacturers cared about backwards compatibility, which I think they do, the likelihood of them switching chip providers would decrease with each generation.