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Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD
- cbsmith 2y agoIn other news... https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-aws-expand-strategic-collaboration-chip-manufacturing-2024-09-16/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/intel-aws-expand-strategi...
- jandrese 2y agoIt's a little vague what the "6 chips" would have been. CPU obviously. Probably some southbridge equivalent, but then what? A NIC? Was Intel going to supply the graphics chip too? That would have been a real turnaround for their GPU division.
- bhouston 2y agoThere wasn't 6 chips. I believe it refers to "PlayStation 6", the version that comes after "PlayStation 5". I think the main thing Intel was competing for was CPU + GPU given they have the new Xe graphics architecture which is decent. But I guess they could have just gone after the CPU with NVIDIA likely then supplying the GPU as they did in the first Xbox.
- eigenform 2y agoI wonder if Sony having to adapt their DRM/platform security strategy into Intel-world would've introduced a lot of friction. This kind of thing is probably part of the motivation behind Intel splitting out a "Partner Security Engine."
- bangaladore 2y agoMaybe 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 custom "APU"; however, their track record with that is not stellar.
- pknomad 2y agoDitto. AMD also reliably delivered on CPUs for the past 2 iterations of both Xbox and PS. AMD feels like the only choice for consoles at this point.
- coder543 2y agoWell, 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.
- pinewurst 2y agoThat's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Switch is lower price, lower performance by design and used, even originally, a mature NVIDIA SoC, not really a custom.
- mdasen 2y agoThe 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 been putting out amazing custom cores. AMD can simply repackage some Zen X cores with RDNA X GPU and with a little work have something Sony can use. Nvidia would need to either grab off-the-shelf ARM Cortex cores (like most of their ARM CPUs use) or Sony would need to bet that Nvidia could and would give them leading-edge performance on custom designed cores. But would Nvidia come in at a price that Sony would pay? Probably not. AMD's costs are probably a lot lower since they're going to be doing all that CPU work anyway for the rest of their business. For Nintendo, the calculus is a bit different. Nintendo is fine with off-the-shelf cores that are less powerful than smartphones and they're already on ARM so there's no backward incompatibility there. But for Sony whose business is different, it'd be a huge gamble.
- epolanski 2y agoNot 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.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago> both x86 and a solid GPU technology that comes with it If only Project Denver had kept its original goal
- 0xcde4c3db 2y agoBackward 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.
- hypercube33 2y agoAMD 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.
- blitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- andrewstuart 2y agoEverything is about GPUs these days. Be it little GPUs inside the CPU package or be it consumer GPUs or big GPUs in data centers. Unless Intel can start to get its GPU act together, it won't be leading the industry again in a hurry.
- MBCook 2y agoThey’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.
- criticalfault 2y agoIf 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.
- bgnn 2y agoThey have to do that to stay in fab business. Their design business is gonna be sold out I think, like HP/Agilent.
- onepointsixC 2y agoThe business doesn’t survive if it’s split.
- selimthegrim 2y agoWhich one
- PolygonSheep 2y agoYes.
- ac29 2y agoIntel announced today they are moving their foundry to a subsidiary, so if anything its the fab business that will be spun out.
- whalesalad 2y agoIntel hasn't made a console CPU/GPU since... the original Xbox? AMD has done: Gamecube, Wii, Xbox 360 (gpu, not cpu), Xbox one, PS4, PS5 ...
- snitty 2y agoJust to clarify, GameCube and Wii CPU was an IBM PowerPC chip. GPU was ATI in both, later acquired by AMD.
- christkv 2y agoI think GameCube GPU was ArtX bought by ATI then ATI bought by AMD.
- aappleby 2y agoI was there, this is correct.
- whalesalad 2y agoya should have clarified gpu-only. I am tacking ATI into AMD.
- mey 2y agoThe Steamdeck is an AMD APU (potentially originally developed for Magic Leap), and several follow on portable PC handhelds using AMD Z1 apus. https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/handhelds/ryzen-z1.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/handhelds/ryzen-z...
- kcb 2y agoEven then the GPU was Nvidia.
- mastazi 2y agoAccording 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.
- deelowe 2y agoI mean, it's very likely next gen consoles will feature AI hardware. The PS5 pro is already touting it.
- MBCook 2y ago> It bothers me and makes it difficult to take the article seriously. But if you’re in the chip game AI is the big thing of the last 10 years. It’s driven a huge chunk of new sales and demand for upgraded choices than they likely would have seen otherwise. Having missed out on AI in many ways (nVidia was perfectly positioned, AMD better than Intel) they need stuff to keep growing. Their current business is looking shakier than any time in recent history. ARM is getting pretty realistic on the desktop. Apple proved it and now Samsung and Qualcomm have parts for Windows users that perform well enough (compared to the failure of early ARM on Windows). They’re behind on selling silicon for AI to business and it’s not clear consumers care enough to upgrade their PCs. And when consumers upgrade they have not only great options from AMD, doing better than ever, but the ARM threat. They’re being squeezed on all sides. The PS6 wouldn’t make them dominant but it would have been a very steady and reliable revenue stream for years and a chance at parlaying that into additional business. “See what we did for Sony? We can do that for you.” The article seemed rather well done to me. I think you’re being too dismissive in this case.
- voytec 2y agos/Playstation/PlayStation 6/ - next generation
- lapinovski 2y agoplaystation 6 already?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wmf 2y agoIt will probably be released around 2027-2028.
- MBCook 2y agoAnd 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.
- Narishma 2y agoThe 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.
- Danieru 2y agoNo 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 reportedly got the contract. That time too we got news articles lamenting this loss for AMD. As a gamedev I have a different perspective: Sony and Nintendo would be fools to give up backwards compatibility just for savings on chips. Switching vendors does not just invalidate old games compatibility, it also requires retooling for their internal libraries. Console games, outside small or open source engines, use proprietary graphics api. Those apis are tied to the hardware. With this coming generation from Nintendo, and the "current gen" from Sony and Xbox they've been able to mostly reuse much of their software investment. I'd case more but this is obviously nda, other devs should be able to confirm. Thus I don't think AMD for switch2 or Intel for ps6 was ever a credible path. Their bids existed to keep the existing vendor from getting overly greedy and ruining the parade for everyone. This is important, famously the original Xbox got hamstrung in the market by Nvidia's greed and refusal to lower prices as costs went down.
- senkora 2y ago+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 optimize for the console. If you suddenly changed the micro-architecture (if switching to Intel), then old games could suddenly become janky and slow even though both systems are x86. (This would only matter if you were pushing performance to the edge, which is why it rarely matters for general software development, but console game dev pushes to the edge) So it isn't just the graphics APIs that would change going from AMD to Intel, but the CPU performance as well.
- mikepavone 2y ago
- johnklos 2y agoAnd they rightly deserve to lose the business to AMD. Intel to Apple: "We're too big to deliver what you want for cell phones." Apple: "Ok. We'll use ARM." Intel to Sony: "We're too big to commit to pricing, compatibility and volume." Sony:" Ok. We'll keep using AMD." It's interesting that Intel keeps trying to ship "features", some of arguable utility but others that are decently helpful, like AVX-512, that now AMD delivers and Intel does not. I'm sure Sony didn't want a processor that can't properly and performantly run older and current titles.
- tester756 2y ago>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.”
- toast0 2y agoIMO, more interesting than Intel not doing the iPhone is Intel ending atom for phones right before Microsoft demoed Continuum for Windows Mobile 10. That would have been a much different product on an x86 phone, IMHO. Maybe it would have been enough of an exciting feature that Microsoft would have not botched the Windows Mobile 10 release.
- fhdsgbbcaA 2y agoThis 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- langsoul-com 2y agoWhy did amd win the console business? It seems that even though they weren't number 1, they were always on most consoles.
- JonChesterfield 2y agoI 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.
- philistine 2y ago> [..] something architecturally similar to the mac arm systems would be a reasonable alternative. It's called the Nintendo Switch, and its the second best selling console of all time.
- MBCook 2y agoIt was also targeting a very different capability level from the PS4/XBox One.
- someNameIG 2y agoARM would be a reasonable alternative. Unity/UE5 already support it due to mobile and Nintendo Switch, and consoles are usually more power/thermally constrained than desktops, so AMR in many ways would be a better alternative than x64. Plus PlayStation is big enough that if they went ARM, game devs would have to follow.
- MBCook 2y agoBut were there fast/powerful enough ARM chips to be competitive with what ended up in the PS4/XBox One? They certainly exist today. But could Sony and Microsoft have chosen them or would they have had to have them developed?
- jheriko 2y agonon-news. signed. gamedev.
- apexalpha 2y agoTitle is a bit weird; AMD has been the supplier for PS4 and PS5 already and will continue to supply the PS6. I guess Intel lost the bidding process but they never had the 'Playstation business' in the first place. Nevertheless, an interesting read.
- nottorp 2y ago> Intel and AMD were the final two contenders in the bidding process for the contract. That's an interesting question. Will either Sony or MS break backwards compatibility by going away from x86 again in the future? Definitely not with the next console generation. On the CPU side, MS does have good x86-on-arm emulation from their brand new windows arm so it's conceivable. Not sure how bad it would be on the GPU side.
- ThatPlayer 2y agoGames aren't running on GPUs directly; they're using APIs like DirectX for Xbox. As long as the GPU implements the APIs properly it should be fine. RISC-V Linux with a desktop PCI-E AMD GPU and Linux kernel drivers can run games already: https://youtu.be/qHLKB39xVkw https://youtu.be/qHLKB39xVkw, limited by the power of the RISC-V CPU here. I'm wondering if they would still aim for a single chip when moving to ARM. AMD (and Intel) don't make ARM chips. Nvidia does, and is probably what the next Switch will use. Qualcomm does have proper DX12 support on Windows ARM, but who knows how that'll scale since they make mostly mobile GPUs. Intel had similar problems scaling their iGPUs for Arc.
- motbus3 2y agoSince intel got fat gov and cloud contracts, nothing else matters