Hacker News Reader

Comment by softfalcon | Hacker News Reader

I feel like people forget that AMD has huge contracts with Microsoft, Valve, Sony, etc to design consoles at scale. It's an invisible provider as most folks don't even realize their Xbox and their Playstation are both AMD.

When you're providing fab designs at that scale, it makes a lot more sense to folks that companies would be willing to try a more affordable option to nVidia hardware.

My bet is that AMD figures out a service-able solution for some (not all) workloads that isn't ground breaking, but affordable to the clients that want an alternative. That's usually how this goes for AMD in my experience.

View on HN

If you read/listen to the Stratechary interview wirh Lisa Hsu, she spelled out being open ro customizing AMD hardware to meet partner's needs. So if Microsoft needs more memory bandwidth and less compute, AMD will build something just for them based on what they have now. If Meta wants 10% less power consumption (and cooling) for a 5% hit in compute, AMD will hear them out too. We'll see if that hardware customization strategy works outside of consoles.

It certainly helps differentiate from NVIDIA's "Don't even think about putting our chips on a PCB we haven't vetted" approach.

Yeah, but they will be using internal Microsoft and Meta software stacks, nothing that will dent CUDA.

>I feel like people forget that AMD has huge contracts with Microsoft, Valve, Sony, etc to design consoles at scale.

Nobody forget that, just that those console chips are super low margins, which is why Intel and Nvidia stopped catering to that market after the Xbox/PS3 generations and only AMD took it up because they were broke and every penny mattered to them.

Nvidia did a brief stint with the Shield/Switch because they were trying to get into the Android/ARM space and also kinda gave up due to the margins.

A market that keeps being discussed that is reaching its end, as newer generations aren't that much into traditional game consoles, and both Sony and Microsoft[0] have to reach out to PCs and mobile devices, to achieve sales growth.

Among the gamer community the discussion of this being the last generation keeps poping up.

[0] - Nintendo is more than happy to keep redoing their hit franchaises, in good enough hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com