Comment by nottorp
> 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.
Games 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, 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.