Comment by langsoul-com
Comment by langsoul-com 4 days ago
Why did amd win the console business? It seems that even though they weren't number 1, they were always on most consoles.
Comment by langsoul-com 4 days ago
Why did amd win the console business? It seems that even though they weren't number 1, they were always on most consoles.
You’re right they didn’t want to target weird things like the PS3 anymore, that was a huge pain.
But you have to remember the other side: there were no other options than x86.
ARM wasn’t powerful enough for one of the high-end consoles at the time. Trying to have such a chip designed would be a lot more expensive than just choosing a premade design and tweaking at a little. It worked for Nintendo but they had different goals. I’m not sure ARM could’ve been used it for the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
The previous supplier, IBM PowerPC, had basically given up. Apple switched off them for the same reason. It wasn’t getting much faster and IBM only really seemed interested in server chips. I think it’s reasonable to assume they wouldn’t have tried very hard to win a chance to make a faster console chip.
If you don’t want to design your own, that’s all the major players. x86-64 is all that’s left.
Which is not to say that was a bad option. Developers are extremely familiar with it, there’s a metric ton of tools available, it makes game porting to and from PCs easier, it was the highest performance option, and there are two big suppliers that you can play against each other. So even if you went with Intel and something happened you could switch to AMD.
When IBM decided they didn’t care about the market, you just had to leave the PowerPC.
Why AMD over Intel? They were probably hungrier since they were in second place. They had a competitive GPU business, which Intel didn’t. Single supplier + they could do everything on one chip. And if AMD makes both parts they can help optimize the hell out of it.
Microsoft got screwed by nVidia on the XBox. I don’t think they’d want to do that again. Sony would absolutely know that happened and be wary.
Honestly it’s not clear to me that nVidia cared too much. But maybe I’m just reading it wrong. Nintendo went with them because they had and all in one system on a chip they were willing to dump for cheap that thanks to its mobile heritage developers were already familiar with.
Also since AMD was the little guy (compared to Intel) they could really use the sales and the revenue. It would be a bigger percentage of their total income than Intel, meaning it was more important to win that contract.
So in the end I think it makes a lot of sense that PlayStation and Xbox ended up in AMD land.
> [..] 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.
ARM 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.
I'm not sure, the Jaguar CPUs in them were pretty underpowered at the time too, they were tablet/netbook level. I think they were in some ways a bit of a downgrade in CPU performance compared to the Cell in the PS3.
Biggest issue at the time would have been an ARM CPU with a decent GPU if they wanted a SoC instead of having them separate dies
This is just a hypothesis, but I wonder if it’s simply that AMD was willing to accept lower margins to keep their business going, where INTC wasn’t willing to compete because they’re comparing the contract to the higher margin sales they made in the PC business?
I mean, sure, technical issues and such too, but mature businesses have a hard time accepting lower margins because it hurts their stock market metrics.
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.