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

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ARM's 64-bit A53 and A57 aren't available today, nor were they available last year when MS/Sony needed production ready silicon. These 64-bit ARM architectures are being tuned for the 20nm and 16nm/14nm-XM FinFET (20nm BEOL) processes. That's 1.5-3 years too late for Sony and MS.

I'm not disagreeing with you that ARM would have a very tempting solution in 1.5-3 years, I'm just stating that it's too late.

Yes, many games are cross platform, the problem with that argument is that they aren't the same games. Nobody is going to buy a smartphone/tablet game for $60, and as a result that market is at a stark contrast compared to the PC/console one.

So, yes, nVidia and Qualcomm and PowerVR will offer 1-2 TFLOPs solutions in 2-3 years, but AMD has offered that last year.
 
SiliconWars said:
Wow, been a while since I read this kind of doom prediction about AMD, or maybe they just get lost and ignored in amongst the constant stock upgrades since the start of the year.
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Hedge funds only care about today; they don't care about 2 years from now. They see the console deals and use it to hype the stock; they will get out before reality sets in.
 
sontin said:
@galego

You are right: x86 is so great that every market outside of windows is dumping it right now. :lol:

BTW: Sony and Microsoft never received Samples from nVidia or Intel. What they saw would be powerpoint slides of roadmaps, performance targets and prices.

And just no: No sane company would chose Jaguar if CPU performance was a priority.
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just have to ask what if smart phone user wise up and stop paying for new phones every 6-12 months what will arm sales look like ? when good enough is good enough.

-edit
I think it's pocket change but going forward how will this relate to pre orders
http://www.techspot.com/news/53216-...illion-for-not-meeting-iphone-sales-goal.html
 
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jpiniero said:
Grow where? They have no relevant tablet or smartphone chip. Servers are more or less dead. As PC sales continue to slide, I am not seeing where AMD plans to turn to, unless it's simply the consoles.

I see AMD spinning off what they can to settle the $2B debt, laying everyone off and just becoming a holding company for the console IP until the console lifecycle ends.



GDDR5 is going to be too expensive.
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Servers are actually looking to be bright spot with AMD because of Seamicro, and they've been executing almost perfectly in that area.
 
rgallant said:
just have to ask what if smart phone user wise up and stop paying for new phones every 6-12 months what will arm sales look like ? when good enough is good enough.
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I only just this past week replaced my mobile phone from 2007 with a smartphone. Unless something technical about this new smartphone prevents me from repeating that, I won't be replacing this thing for another 5-6 yrs.

But I don't think the annual replacement cycle will subside. The phones are just cheap enough, and even more so when subsidized by a phone contract, that it doesn't represent an unacceptable burden on the disposable income budget for the younger crowd of consumers who also don't mind paying $3 for a cup of coffee or $500 (minimum) for a Coach hand bag and so on.

Smartphones have to become "un-chic" before the upgrade cadence will be put in jeopardy IMO.
 
Idontcare said:
I only just this past week replaced my mobile phone from 2007 with a smartphone. Unless something technical about this new smartphone prevents me from repeating that, I won't be replacing this thing for another 5-6 yrs.

But I don't think the annual replacement cycle will subside. The phones are just cheap enough, and even more so when subsidized by a phone contract, that it doesn't represent an unacceptable burden on the disposable income budget for the younger crowd of consumers who also don't mind paying $3 for a cup of coffee or $500 (minimum) for a Coach hand bag and so on.

Smartphones have to become "un-chic" before the upgrade cadence will be put in jeopardy IMO.
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They will be fine. People have bought new phones to replace old phones even for plain old calls and texting, see the RAZR craze years back.
 
pelov said:
The decision to go with x86 had to do with developer familiarity and time-to-market. ARM wouldn't have been a poor choice in 1-2 years, but the lack of a true 64-bit architecture right now is what threw them out of that race. nVidia would only have offered an ARM solution, and almost certainly a bog standard ARM core like an A15, and that just isn't going to cut it.

The lead architect of the PS4 went on record stating their reasons for opting to go with x86, and those were:

- developer familiarity
- decreased time-to-market for games
- lower cost of development

This same video didn't go in depth regarding why AMD's Jaguar was picked, but he did say something like "in the end there was only one clear choice." A couple of other things mentioned were:

- developers wanted lots of fast RAM, and preferably GDDR5
- larger portion of the transistor budget spent on the GPU
- 4-8 CPU threads

The video was really long and I found him to be very annoying to listen to, going on at length about stuff nobody cares about, but there were some informative and interesting tidbits in there. I'll try to find the link and post it here



w0t?

Jaguar is a great, cheap little chip. It hits that 5-10W threshold, provides great GPU performance, and it doesn't cost a fortune. In contrast, Intel still has to rely on a poor PowerVR graphics solution that has real difficulty driving 1080p displays (or even playing high quality video); and you can forget about gaming on it unless you stick strictly to Metro. Even still, the lack of Win8 tablets has more to do with the incredibly poor Win8 tablet sales than the underlying hardware.

The problem for Intel and AMD in the mobile space is: why would an OEM choose x86 over ARM? The x86 instruction set carries a lot of weight in enterprise and PCs, but it offers no such obvious advantages in tablets/smartphones.
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Well, granted I am older and grew up in the PC environment instead of android, but I would take windows hands down any day in a tablet. It just offers much more uasbility than android if you want to do any sort of productivity. For a phone on the I could live with android. And I do have an android tablet, so I am not condemning it without first-hand experience.
 
Idontcare said:
I only just this past week replaced my mobile phone from 2007 with a smartphone. Unless something technical about this new smartphone prevents me from repeating that, I won't be replacing this thing for another 5-6 yrs.
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I only just a few months ago replaced my vintage 2004 Razr V3. :thumbsup:

It went through the gradual transition of a crack in the front display glass, to the front display glass being totally shattered and held in with scotch tape, to the front display glass peeled off entirely, to the front LCD finally getting punctured and turned into a quickly expanding colorful blob.

Only replaced it after I realized that a off-contract data + limited voice plan would cost substantially less than what I was paying, and because the Nexus 4 was a good value. I mean, that and my phone being really close to completely destroyed.

I heard several horror stories about how the Nexus 4 shatters if you drop it half an inch onto a pillow, the temperature changes half a degree, or you look at it funny, so I was immediately resigned to it breaking on me very soon. Somehow it's survived a few flat out drops without any problems (and has no protection.. starting to wonder if the bumpers somehow make it more likely to break)
 
Exophase said:
I only just a few months ago replaced my vintage 2004 Razr V3. :thumbsup:

It went through the gradual transition of a crack in the front display glass, to the front display glass being totally shattered and held in with scotch tape, to the front display glass peeled off entirely, to the front LCD finally getting punctured and turned into a quickly expanding colorful blob.

Only replaced it after I realized that a off-contract data + limited voice plan would cost substantially less than what I was paying, and because the Nexus 4 was a good value. I mean, that and my phone being really close to completely destroyed.

I heard several horror stories about how the Nexus 4 shatters if you drop it half an inch onto a pillow, the temperature changes half a degree, or you look at it funny, so I was immediately resigned to it breaking on me very soon. Somehow it's survived a few flat out drops without any problems (and has no protection.. starting to wonder if the bumpers somehow make it more likely to break)
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LOL, mine only degraded to the phase I bolded above, you definitely got a few more years of solid depreciation out of yours!
 
I finally went to a smartphone last year, did it due to wanting a few features but also because of the new 28nm process to the battery life is a bit better than 40nm offerings. My main concern now is battery life.

I loathe how in the future there will be quadcore or more phones. I just want a nice dualcore and no dark silicon which still leaks my previous electrons.
 
Sweepr said:
NVIDIA is inside my Nexus 7. I bet this tablet model sold more than all AMD-based tablet offerings combined. Sounds relevant to me. I woudn't call Intel irrelevant until we see how Bay Trail plays out.
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Yeah and the only reason you bought it was because it was dirt cheap. And the reason it was dirt cheap is Nvidia was basically giving Tegra 3 away by that stage.
 
The real reason Microsoft and Sony chose AMD is because they knew AMD was able to deliver everything they wanted if you ask me 🙂
 
NTMBK said:
Not in the console market, which is what this thread is about.



Not in the console market, which is what this thread is about.



The console wins will help alleviate their WSA issues.



This thread isn't about the mobile world.



This thread isn't about the HPC world.



This thread isn't about the server market.



Not in the console market, which is what this thread is about.



Not in the console market, which is what this thread is about.



The console wins are completed, and now the only required R&D is for die-shrinks.

You seem to want to talk about anything but the original topic. 🙄
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Great post.
 
sontin said:
@galego
You are right: x86 is so great that every market outside of windows is dumping it right now. :lol:
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This is completely unrelated to anything that I said here.

sontin said:
BTW: Sony and Microsoft never received Samples from nVidia or Intel. What they saw would be powerpoint slides of roadmaps, performance targets and prices.
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You cannot run benchmarks in a powerpoint slide or in a price card:

there was a technical "bake-off", where prototype silicon was tested against each other across a myriad of application-based and synthetic benchmarks. At the end of the bake-off, ARM was deemed as not having the right kind of horsepower and that its 64-bit architecture wasn’t ready soon enough.
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:biggrin:

sontin said:
And just no: No sane company would chose Jaguar if CPU performance was a priority.
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The companies that count are selecting AMD Jaguar-based solution, rather than low performance solutions from the competence:

ARM-based architectures will soon get as powerful as AMD’s Jaguar cores, but not when Sony or Microsoft needed them for their new consoles.
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krumme said:
No because the stock price have shown otherwise, and the arguments in this thread the same.

What remains is execution.
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Well, before you get too excited, the stock has made a nice move since a few months ago, but is only back to one year ago levels, and only about half of what it was routinely trading at before that, just to put things in a broader historical perspective.
 
frozentundra123456 said:
Well, granted I am older and grew up in the PC environment instead of android, but I would take windows hands down any day in a tablet. It just offers much more uasbility than android if you want to do any sort of productivity. For a phone on the I could live with android. And I do have an android tablet, so I am not condemning it without first-hand experience.
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The Microsoft Surface Pro has sold reasonably well and it is x86-x64.
 
sontin said:
So the stock price is a result of AMD's Llano dumping into the india market for 1/5 of the real value? :hmm:
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No i dont think so, do you?

Getting the 2 console deals confirmed matters big time for amd business. What about providing argument for the oposite?
We havnt seen a single one, for the plain reason its a pathetic thinking from the start.
 
Talking about console hardware. Seems MS is getting second thoughts about their choice:
http://vr-zone.com/articles/microso...cations-to-fight-the-playstation-4/45218.html

PS4-and-Xbox-One-GPU.jpg


The Xbox One is not far from being "Wii". Its really hard to see anything but Sony taking it all.

And with MS restructuring. The cost of the Xbox division will be very highlighted to the stockholders. So anotehr Xbox fail (economicly) and MS is out of the consoles.
 
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Yeah, my son wanted the XBox One. I guess I'll be trying to talk him out of it. Unless MS pulls a wicked fast one and ups the GPU.
 
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