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The real reasons Microsoft and Sony chose AMD for consoles [F]

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Console are not a high profile, high volume market. They are selling around 20 Millions per year. The same amount like Tegra 3 last year and less than 1/3 of nVidia's GPU business.
 
sontin said:
Console are not a high profile, high volume market. They are selling around 20 Millions per year. The same amount like Tegra 3 last year and less than 1/3 of nVidia's GPU business.
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Go up to 10 random people in the street, ask them whether they have heard of "Playstation 3", or "XBox 360". Then ask them if they have heard of "Nexus 7", or "Surface RT". Then come back to me, and tell me which is more high profile.
 
sontin said:
Console are not a high profile, high volume market. They are selling around 20 Millions per year. The same amount like Tegra 3 last year and less than 1/3 of nVidia's GPU business.
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Oh. Well then good to see Nvidia moving on from the small volume, fringe business of consoles. Investors must be tickled pink.
 
AnandThenMan said:
Oh. Well then good to see Nvidia moving on from the small volume, fringe business of consoles. Investors must be tickled pink.
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I bet Nvidia employees could barely move around the office it was so full of shareholder thank you letters.
 
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sontin said:
Console are not a high profile, high volume market. They are selling around 20 Millions per year. The same amount like Tegra 3 last year and less than 1/3 of nVidia's GPU business.
Click to expand...

The Wii alone sold more than 20 million in 2008 and 2009. Recently, sales are down because the consoles are aging, but it's easy to see that sales on the launch year should be above 40-50 million per console. They sell as many as they make.
 
AnandThenMan said:
Oh. Well then good to see Nvidia moving on from the small volume, fringe business of consoles. Investors must be tickled pink.
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Sony sold 80 millions consoles in the last 7 years. That is a little bit more than 10 millions per year.

That is only 1/5 of nVidia's GPU business per year. And only half of what Tegra 3 did last year.

nVidia never got more than one design. For them it makes sense to invest money where they can really growth. And that is GPU market (Grid, HPC, virtualization) and mobile.

sushiwarrior said:
The Wii alone sold more than 20 million in 2008 and 2009. Recently, sales are down because the consoles are aging, but it's easy to see that sales on the launch year should be above 40-50 million per console. They sell as many as they make.
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Wii? You mean the one hit wonder from 2006? ...
BTW: The WiiU is using an outdated GPU design. AMD got only a dollar or two for every console.
 
sontin said:
Sony sold 80 millions consoles in the last 7 years. That is a little bit more than 10 millions per year.

That is only 1/5 of nVidia's GPU business per year. And only half of what Tegra 3 did last year.

nVidia never got more than one design. For them it makes sense to invest money where they can really growth. And that is GPU market (Grid, HPC, virtualization) and mobile.
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And Xbox and Wii sold ~180 million, no wonder Nvidia quit, they clearly weren't happy being #2 🙄

sontin said:
Wii? You mean the one hit wonder from 2006? ...
BTW: The WiiU is using an outdated GPU design. AMD got only a dollar or two for every console.
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One hit wonder that sold more than the PS3 or Xbox 360. Yes, it's outdated, so is the PS3 and Xbox360 GPU, what's your point?
 
And? nVidia was never an option for the WiiU because Nintendo wanted backward compatibility and a very cheap design.

And then: Why are we talking about the Wii anyway? The WiiU is struggling right now and is selling not as good as Nintendo expected it.

...
 
I don't think Nvidia is an option for anyone because they all want cheap designs 😛

So what if the WiiU is struggling, the Wii sold a ton, why does it matter what the WiiU is doing? What if I, for example, said Tegra 3 was a one hit wonder, and Tegra 4 isn't selling as well as Nvidia expected it to. Do you get my point? Tegra 3 was great, the successor doesn't determine it's success.
 
sushiwarrior said:
I don't think Nvidia is an option for anyone because they all want cheap designs 😛

So what if the WiiU is struggling, the Wii sold a ton, why does it matter what the WiiU is doing?
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Because we talking here about the next gen and why Sony and MS chose AMD...

What if I, for example, said Tegra 3 was a one hit wonder, and Tegra 4 isn't selling as well as Nvidia expected it to. Do you get my point? Tegra 3 was great, the successor doesn't determine it's success.
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Consoles are on the market for 5-8 years. ARM SoCs for around 12 to 18 months before they get a successor.
 
sontin said:
Sony sold 80 millions consoles in the last 7 years. That is a little bit more than 10 millions per year.

That is only 1/5 of nVidia's GPU business per year. And only half of what Tegra 3 did last year.
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So the XBone and PS4 will probably ship as many units a year as Tegra does, with AMD having to do very little further R&D on them (only die shrinks), for the next 7 to 8 years? Compared to NVidia continuing to sink vast quantities of cash into Tegra at an increasing rate in a desperate attempt to make it relevant against Qualcomm? I fail to see how this is bad for AMD...
 
sontin said:
Consoles are on the market for 5-8 years. ARM SoCs for around 12 to 18 months before they get a successor.
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Which is what makes the console contracts so sweet, the revenue stream keeps coming in long after the initial dev costs have been paid for. Even better if you already have the basic tech in your portfolio.
 
NTMBK said:
So the XBone and PS4 will probably ship as many units a year as Tegra does, with AMD having to do very little further R&D on them (only die shrinks), for the next 7 to 8 years? Compared to NVidia continuing to sink vast quantities of cash into Tegra at an increasing rate in a desperate attempt to make it relevant against Qualcomm? I fail to see how this is bad for AMD...
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Yeah. I think a 30% revenue decline Y-Y is not bad at all when you won the console designs. :awe:

AnandThenMan said:
Which is what makes the console contracts so sweet, the revenue stream keeps coming in long after the initial dev costs have been paid for. Even better if you already have the basic tech in your portfolio.
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It's only coming if they can sell the consoles. If not...

And now the "next gen" console will be much faster outdated. So the revenue stream is under a bigger pressure than it was in the last round.
 
sontin said:
Yeah. I think a 30% revenue decline Y-Y is not bad at all when you won the console designs. :awe:



It's only coming if they can sell the consoles. If not...

And now the "next gen" console will be much faster outdated. So the revenue stream is under a bigger pressure than it was in the last round.
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Didn't 8800 GTX came out between xbox360 and ps3 release? Offering more performance than both consoles combined?
It is not any different this time.
 
sontin said:
It's only coming if they can sell the consoles. If not...

And now the "next gen" console will be much faster outdated. So the revenue stream is under a bigger pressure than it was in the last round.
Click to expand...

PS4 and Xbox One apparently sold through their launch day supply already.
 
Erenhardt said:
Didn't 8800 GTX came out between xbox360 and ps3 release? Offering more performance than both consoles combined?
It is not any different this time.
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It was a $649 card.
End of the year you will get the same performance for under $200.

The difference between 2005-2006 and today is huge. Look at the CPU: Nobody would put something like that into their gaming pc.

Vesku said:
PS4 and Xbox One apparently sold through their launch day supply already.
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Cool. So how many units are sold? 100k? 1 million?
 
I think some of you are actually arguing the same thing, but from opposite sides of the equation. Of course Nvidia could have built something that would have made Sony/MS happy. They've done it before and won contracts. But to do it at a cost that made sense to Nvidia, and to do it in the timeframe that MS and Sony wanted while keeping those costs competitive probably couldn't be done.

On the other hand AMD had the technology on the shelf, it probably took very little investment (relatively speaking) for AMD to put together some of these existing technologies and to do it quickly.

Nvidia didn't have the technology ready to go. By the time they built it the price would probably have to be much higher to get the same margins as AMD, and I'd be surprised if we had anything in 2013. So it can be worded differently or looked at from whatever angle, but I don't see anything that makes me think Nvidia didn't get in the consoles because they really didn't want to be in them. It just didn't make sense for Nvidia or Sony/MS/Nintendo.
 
Erenhardt said:
ohh.. and GTX Titan is $1000... I C what you did there.
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Titan costs $1000 because the competition is doing a break.
A GTX770/7970GHz for $399 is 2x faster than the PS4. A GTX660/7850 for under $199 has the same speed.

How many custom IBM cores do you have in your desktop?
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It was a 3Core/6Threads processor. End of 2005 DualCore cost so much that a lot of people had singlecore CPUs.
Now you can buy a 4Core i5 for under $200 which has the same speed or is much faster up to 4 threads.
 
Not at all SlowSpyder, many of us have been saying Nvidia could not provide a competitive SoC design to the AMD one chosen by MS and Sony. 64 bit ARM won't be available until at least mid next year. Nvidia GPU would need to be paired with an Intel CPU to meet the launch window, there is no way those two companies would ever cooperate to the extent necessary to beat the AMD bid.
 
I mentioned before that Intel would have taken low margins on the consoles just to kill off AMD. Nvidia would do it doubly so, they've been desperate for AMD to die so they have total control of the graphics market.

AMD is up 10% today - http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/amd and it's not on the strength of the PC market that's for certain. The console wins have given them one last chance that they must take. Nvidia would have done anything to win instead so something else must have been deficient somewhere.
 
Vesku said:
Not at all SlowSpyder, many of us have been saying Nvidia could not provide a competitive SoC design to the AMD one chosen by MS and Sony. 64 bit ARM won't be available until at least mid next year. Nvidia GPU would need to be paired with an Intel CPU to meet the launch window, there is no way those two companies would ever cooperate to the extent necessary to beat the AMD bid.
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Ah, I see... I guess I was the one with the misunderstanding, then. 🙂 At any rate I think it is safe to say that Nvidia isn't out of the consoles simply because they didn't want to be in them.
 
Lol, nVidia is not interested in killing AMD. They're going their way. Would they want to smash them they would sell their lineup for half the price.

AMD got a "buy" rating from the Bank of America. I think they want to sell their stock. Makes no sense because 75% of their business comes from the x86 market which declined again.

And if anyone think that the console business will save them, good luck AMD. You will need it.
 
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