Why did amd win the console business? It seems that even though they weren't number 1, they were always on most consoles.
Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
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Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#62If we are talking foundry, Intel could still manufacture amd chips in their own fab instead of tsmc. Given that 18A is good... This would be strange, but it would show Intel will do what it takes.
They have to do that to stay in fab business. Their design business is gonna be sold out I think, like HP/Agilent.
The business doesn’t survive if it’s split.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#63According 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.
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.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#64No 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…
The whole article seems unfair to Intel. They didn’t lose the contract because they didn’t have it in the first place. I think your analysis is correct. They win a little if they don’t get the contract and they win a lot if they do. It was a no brainer to bid on it.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#65Earlier 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…
> 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. What? The Jaguar-based CPU in the PS4 has both a much lower clock and substantially lower IPC than the Zen 2 based one in the PS5. The timings are not remotely the same and the micro-architectures are quite different. Jaguar was a…
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Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#66No 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…
+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.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#67non-news.
signed. gamedev.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#68No 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…
+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 support all of the platforms. The companies that do go through that effort tend to have very notable releases.
Nobody is hand-tuning Assembler code these days to fit into tight instruction windows. At least, not outside of some very specific logic fragments. Instead they're all writing generic interrupt-based logic. Which is fine, as that's what the newer CPUs expect and optimize for internally.
In addition, the difference in the Zen generation gap is as different as switching to Intel. We're talking fairly different cache coherency, memory hierarchies, CCX methodologies, micro-op and instruction timings, iGPU configurations, etc.
That all being said, AMD was going to beat Intel regardless because of established business relationships and their current internal struggles (both business-wise and R&D) making it fairly difficult for them to provide an equivalent alternative.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#69Not sure the title has the right framing. It's hard to compete with AMD which is the only tech company to offer both x86 and a solid GPU technology that comes with it. On top of that you have backwards compatibility woes and the uncertainty around Intel being able to deliver on its foundry. All in all, this win would've been a great deal for Intel's foundry in PR, but money wise those were never going to be huge sums…
AMD also has a track record for Sony and consoles in general dating back to the game cube and delivering success. Maybe not the fastest thing but one that works and is reliable. Nvidia, IBM and Intel don't exactly deliver on the full suite either.
Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 a…
I think a PS6 needs to play PS5 games, or Sony will have a hard time selling them until the PS6 catalog is big; and they'll have a hard time getting 3rd party developers if they're going to have a hard time with console sales. I don't think you're going to play existing PS5 games on an ARM CPU unless it's an "amazing" core. Apple does pretty good at running x86 code on their CPUs, but they added special modes to make…
I mean, the PS4 didn't play PS3 games and that didn't hurt it any. Backwards compatibility is nice but it isn't the only factor.