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AMD beats out Nvidia and Intel for PlayStation 5 processor — and what that means for gamers.

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Nvidia doesn't sell stuff for a loss.

AMD however, bargain bins itself for any deal.

It's basically a two player market for cpus and gpus, where AMD is second in both.

Intel and Nvidia makes shitloads of sales and profit. You'd think the second place guy in both cpus/gpus would still be able to dominate and reap in profits. It's not like there's 10 players in the market all with a 10% share killing each other for an extra 1%.

But AMD's finanial track record is a train wreck. Somehow they lose money most years. They must dump their chips at insanely low prices, which console makers can't say no.
 
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It's difficult to claim AMD "beat" Nvidia and Intel for console SoC's when literally only AMD actually supplies an x86 SoC which also has a decent performing GPU.

Nvidia has no x86 license, so unless Sony/MS wanted to go with ARM the way Nintendo did with Switch, Nvidia is not possible.

Intel doesn't have a GPU with enough power for a console's graphics demands, so Intel is not possible.

AMD "wins" because no one else sells what Sony/MS need.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Only 2x to Jaguar at equal frequency? Maybe Jaguar is not so shitty people here and other forums said comparing with arm and atoms

Jaguar is not as shitty as people claim it is, it is true Zen 2 is likely to clock a fair bit higher too, and also 2x per clock performance (4x for SIMD friendly math code) is nothing to sneeze at these days... we should be more cynical when they try to sell you the idea that nowadays what you want is a new device every year as technology evolution has slowed down massively... especially on the CPU front :).

A 2x performance improvement at parity of clocks is good :).
 
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Silver Wattle

Gold Member
AMD make cutting edge high performance GPU processors, people who downplay their chips based on benchmarks Vs nvidia's latest show their ignorance.
 
They win based purely on affordability, not on technology.
When you do mass market price / performance is pretty much what you need to look for, how many teraflops can you get for your silicon and monetary budget? Also nvidia has not been a great partner to console makers in the past, so maybe this soured the relationship with both MS and Sony...

Nintendo had different design goals, and the Tegra chip needed a good showcase, so they picked what made sense to them.
 

Shin

Banned
What might mean is that along with the process development at TSMC and things seemingly being on schedule for ones in the GPU department at AMD.
That refreshes might occur a lot sooner and might contain Zen 3. They are from the same family unlike Jaguar/Zen2.
With all that CPU performance I wonder what route they'll take and if anyone will mandate 60FPS, rules of old doesn't necessarily apply.

AMD-CPU-architecture-roadmap.png


AMD-GPU-architecture-roadmap.png
 

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
Doubtful that Intel or nvidia were chasing the consoles. Low margins I think.

Remember years ago when old-shit GAF would bring up “salt” regarding Nvidia not being in PS4 and XB1? That was dumb as hell. Nvidia wasn’t gonna go chasing peanuts.

Peanuts?

The worldwide console market.
The fuck you smoking?
 

Pagusas

Elden Member
Peanuts?

The worldwide console market.
The fuck you smoking?

Margins, razor thin margins, it’s a race to the bottom when dealing with consoles. Nvidia doesn’t want that business at that price. They’ve diversified their portfolio so much they don’t compete on projects they can’t make good money off of. At this point its not even fair to compare the two companies, Nvidia is what 5x’s larger than AMD now?
 

PhoenixTank

Member
It's easy to understand kid.

AMD is not paid per-unit sold. Rather AMD licenses their technology for a flat fee.

It's peanuts kid.
You might be thinking of ARM?

AMD hasn't made a killing (certainly not like Nvidia do) and yeah margins are pretty thin in semi-custom. However that division (Enterprise, Embedded and Semi) pulled in $2.35 billion in net revenue in 2018, and unless things have changed, the majority of that is from consoles (they don't give a detailed breakdown). The more important figure is $163 million in operating income for that division. Thin, but at this scale it makes a difference and I'd very much prefer $163million to $0 or worse.
$2.276 billion and $132million in 2017, $2.305 billion and $283 million in 2016.
Capacity at that node isn't much of an issue AFAIK thanks to GloFlo so the same opportunity cost is lessened compared to Nvidia.

I maintain that this probably kept AMD breathing over the years (or at least gave them breathing room) until they could get away from the Bulldozer line.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Margins, razor thin margins, it’s a race to the bottom when dealing with consoles. Nvidia doesn’t want that business at that price. They’ve diversified their portfolio so much they don’t compete on projects they can’t make good money off of. At this point its not even fair to compare the two companies, Nvidia is what 5x’s larger than AMD now?
Without even looking at AMD and Nvidia's past 20 years of annual reports, I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia has made more profit in ONE YEAR than AMD in 20 years.

AMD loses money in most years, while Nvidia makes 100s of million or even billions of profits per year.

AMDs focus on razer thin console margins shows how desperate they are to make any kind of profit to keep the lights on. Highly profitable companies avoid this stuff as it's a drain on margins, employee effort, and there's not much point having dead weight.

But AMD seems to love it.
 
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