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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

#71

Post by ksec »

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 thing I got it wrong was my prediction of having AAA titles on Xbox and PS would have helped AMD's market share on PC, given those titles are already optimised on Xbox and PS anyway. That didn't happen at all. And Nvidia continue to dominate.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#72

Post by kmeisthax »

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…

Emulating x86 would be an option - though given Sony's history, I doubt they'd consider it seriously.

For context...

- PS1 BC on PS2 was mostly hardware but they (AFAIK?) had to write some code to translate PS1 GPU commands to the PS2 GS. That's why you could forcibly enable bilinear filtering on PS1 games. Later on they got rid of the PS1 CPU / "IO processor" and replaced it with a PPC chip ("Deckard") running a MIPS emulator.

- PS1 BC on PS3 was entirely software; though the Deckard PS2s make this not entirely unprecedented. Sony had already written POPS for PS1 downloads on PS2 BBN[0] and PSP's PS1 Classics, so they knew how to emulate a PS1.

- PS2 BC on PS3 was a nightmare. Originally it was all hardware[1], but then they dropped the EE+GS combo chip and went to GPU emulation, then they dropped the PS2 CPU entirely and all backwards compatibility with it. Then they actually wrote a PS2 emulator anyway, which is part of the firmware, but only allowed to be used with PS2 Classics and not as BC. I guess they consider the purchase price of the games on the shop to also pay for the emulator?

- 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.

At some point Sony gave up on software emulation and decided it's only worth it for retro re-releases where they can carefully control what games run on the emulator and, more importantly, charge you for each re-release. At least the PS4 versions will still play on a PS5... and PS6... right?

[0] A Japan-only PS2 application that served as a replacement for the built-in OSD and let you connect to and download software demos, game trailers, and so on. Also has an e-mail client.

[1] Or at least as "all hardware" as the Deckard PS2s are

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#73

Post by JonChesterfield »

langsoul-com wrote: post #61

Why did amd win the console business? It seems that even though they weren't number 1, they were always on most consoles.

I believe x64 won the PS4 era because games devs were deeply sick of targeting a special purpose architecture for the console and also x86 for the PC game port. At the time all desktop computers for games were x86 based IBM clone things.

I don't know why AMD ended up with the PS4 and the xbox as opposed to Intel getting either, but x86 was probably inevitable. I wonder if these days something architecturally similar to the mac arm systems would be a reasonable alternative.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#74

Post by berbec »

wmf wrote: post #51
bangaladore wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Multiple commenters here are forgetting about discrete Battlemage.

And that's telling, isn't it? Even in this space, Intel's iGPUs are totally ignored or dismissed out of hand. I say it's because they have an unending string of broken promises, saying "This'll be the time we get integrated graphics right", over and over. It's never been true, and I for one have totally wiped them from my vision due to that.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#75

Post by DaoVeles »

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.

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.

Nowadays,I suspect it is almost entirely in the hands of the compilers, the API's and the base OS to figure out the gritty details.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#76

Post by ac29 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #57
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…

Yeah, this was rigged from the start. If Sony did want to take up Intel next gen, they'd need to do a lot of work on backwards compatibility with the PS5 on the PS6. Whereas I imagine the PS6 being a "PS5 Pro Pro" at this rate. I suppose it can be seen as controlling rampant greed (especially for Nvidia), but it feels like the consoles dealt the cards here. There would have needed to either be some revolutionary tech…

> Yeah, this was rigged from the start. If Sony did want to take up Intel next gen, they'd need to do a lot of work on backwards compatibility with the PS5 on the PS6. Whereas I imagine the PS6 being a "PS5 Pro Pro" at this rate.

Why would they need to do a lot more work on compatibility if they'd picked Intel vs AMD?

Either CPU is presumably going to be x86_64. The GPU is almost certainly going to be much different between AMD's PS5 GPU and AMD's PS6 GPU, so the graphics driver will need work either way.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#77

Post by t-3 »

wmf wrote: post #47
alexjplant wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

PS5 had Zen 2 which was fairly new at the time. If PS6 targets 120 fps they'll want a CPU that's double the performance of Zen 2 per thread. You could definitely achieve this with ARM but I'm not sure how new of an ARM core you would need.

Is there a need to ever target 120 fps? Only the best-of-best eyes will even notice a slight difference from 60.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#78

Post by DaoVeles »

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…

A few of the Playstation titles that made their way to PC do seem to have a little home field advantage on AMD chips, but not enough to sway people over to them.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#79

Post by Narishma »

MBCook wrote: post #43
wmf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably be released around 2027-2028.

And with the PS5 Pro announced we know the PS5 is basically dead inside Sony’s engineering organization. Other than a die shrink or chip reduction or something there’s not much else to do. The designs are basically done. So all hardware work would currently be focused on the PS6. At least for the home console line.

The PS5 is definitely not dead, it's their main console. The Pro is a niche machine targeted at wealthy enthusiasts. It will only do a fraction of the regular PS5 sales numbers.

Re: Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

#80

Post by elzbardico »

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…

Sometimes a low margin business is all you need and have to keep the lights on, don't hemorrhage too much people and stay afloat until you get better winds.

Traditional MBA thinking sometimes is too short sighted. For example, PCs might not have been a Cash Cow for IBM, but the Thinkpad brand, the distributor relationships and the customer may had helped IBM more than the cash out selling this business to Lenovo. Maybe having a healthy bridge head with a popular brand of laptops could have helped IBM coming up with some innovative way of selling the overhyped Watson.

The same with AMD and videogames, it paid the bills, paid salaries and left a little profit on the table to be invested. Probably it helped them bridge from their hell days to what they are today.

There's a lot of intangibles and hidden symmetries, serendipitous opportunities that are frequently overlooked by our bean-counting master race overlords.

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