from Hacker News

Intel lost the Sony Playstation business to AMD

by arcanus on 9/16/24, 8:43 PM with 187 comments

  • by Danieru on 9/16/24, 10:36 PM

    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 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.

  • by bangaladore on 9/16/24, 9:33 PM

    Maybe 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.

  • by johnklos on 9/16/24, 10:36 PM

    And 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.

  • by epolanski on 9/16/24, 9:34 PM

    Not 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.

  • by whalesalad on 9/16/24, 9:54 PM

    Intel 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 ...

  • by mastazi on 9/16/24, 10:17 PM

    According 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.

  • by apexalpha on 9/17/24, 7:16 AM

    Title 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.

  • by eigenform on 9/16/24, 9:36 PM

    I 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."

  • by nottorp on 9/17/24, 8:31 AM

    > 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.

  • by langsoul-com on 9/16/24, 11:47 PM

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

  • by jandrese on 9/16/24, 9:10 PM

    It'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.

  • by andrewstuart on 9/16/24, 9:43 PM

    Everything 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.

  • by criticalfault on 9/16/24, 9:47 PM

    If 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.

  • by cbsmith on 9/17/24, 1:21 AM

  • by motbus3 on 9/17/24, 5:52 PM

    Since intel got fat gov and cloud contracts, nothing else matters

  • by voytec on 9/16/24, 10:20 PM

    s/Playstation/PlayStation 6/ - next generation

  • by lapinovski on 9/16/24, 10:25 PM

    playstation 6 already?

  • by jheriko on 9/16/24, 11:58 PM

    non-news.

    signed. gamedev.