Intel is not in a good place right now. The American semiconductor giant missed the opportunity to supply the chips for the upcoming PlayStation 6. AMD won the day, once again.
Much like the current generation of home consoles (and even the previous one), it’s AMD which will equip the PlayStation 6. A profitable market: Sony sells an average of a hundred million units each generation. The current PS5 features a Ryzen 2 processor, with an RDNA 2 graphics circuit also supplied by AMD (the latter also supplies Microsoft since the Xbox One).
The Backwards Compatibility Puzzle for Intel
Sony was tight-lipped about the details during its PS5 Pro reveal last week, but AMD remained the manufacturer’s supplier. And so the company will remain so for the PS6. Much to the chagrin ofIntel : Reuters reports that the group was neck and neck with AMD in the straight of the auction to win this market in 2022.
A dispute over the profit margin Intel hoped to make on each chip sold to Sony scuppered its bid, the news agency reported. AMD came out on top once again, all the more easily because it has expertise in game consoles. Internal projections put the PS6 market at $30 billion over the device’s lifetime.
Intel was getting off on the wrong foot: its chips may have the same x86 architecture as AMD’s processors, but Intel should have developed a backwards compatibility system. The PS6 must be able to run games from previous generations running on AMD chips. Ensuring compatibility with previous versions of the PlayStation would have been expensive and tied up engineering resources. ” explains a Source from Reuters.
However, it will not have escaped anyone’s notice that Intel is not in the best of shape. CEO Pat Gelsinger’s strategy, which wants to put its semiconductor production plants at the service of other manufacturers, is in trouble. This has pushed the company to eliminate thousands of jobs… and to consider even more drastic measures.
Read Abandonment of factory projects, split: everything is on the table to save Intel
Supplying Sony for the PS6 would have been a big win for Intel and the promise of a steady stream of revenue. All is not lost, though: who knows, maybe Microsoft will want to switch to a new supplier for the next Xbox?
As a consolation gift, Gelsinger has landed a contract with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make the chips needed for the online services giant’s AI servers. It’s a multi-year, multi-billion dollar deal.
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Source :
Reuters
