Tom Nook Sawyer
Member
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/16/more-hints-that-amd-is-building-nintendo-nxs-processor/
Advanced Micro Devices still hasnt confirmed anything yet, but the evidence is growing that its designing the processor behind Nintendos upcoming codenamed NX video game console, which is expected to launch in 2016.
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And today, AMD chief executive Lisa Su said that AMD had won a third semi-custom chip design as well. She said that the promise of these chip designs is that they could yield products that, over their lifetime, could generate a billion dollars in sales.
But with the 2012-era Nintendo Wii U, IBM provides a PowerPC processor and AMD provides the graphics chip. With Nintendo, AMD would have to come up with an APU that handled both the CPU and GPU functions and be able to handle the PowerPC processing as well (in order to run older Nintendo games).
To create a backward-compatible console for Nintendo, AMD would have to enable a way for the new console to use software translation in order to run older Wii and Wii U games. Since a new APU from AMD would be much more powerful, that software translation seems like it would be easier to do with modern chip technology. Backward compatibility is thus a hurdle for AMD to overcome with Nintendo, but it is not an insurmountable one.