AMD has almost completely taken over the console market. The PS2 was a MIPS system and the PS3/Xbox360 were PowerPC, but, for the last ten years, Sony and Microsoft have been all AMD. Intel has been out of the game since the original XBox, and nvidia only has the switch to its name. The Steam Deck-style handhelds (like the ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go) are AMD systems.
It’s kind of interesting how they have this hold on gaming outside of conventional PCs, but can’t seem to compete with nvidia on just that one market.
Also AMD pretty much won the full console market while it's absolutely not clear that they'd be in the same position if they wanted to take on nVidia for GPU compute.
The complaint was that AMD was insignificant, not that it's low margin which is a perfectly acceptable business strategy.
As dralley mentioned. AMD is actually one of the few businesses with both strong CPU and GPU expertise. Building a console with any other company would require buying the CPU and GPU from two different companies. Intel would refuse and ARM CPUs including the ones Nvidia designed are not powerful enough, so really AMD CPU+Nvidia GPU is the only alternative to AMD CPU+AMD GPU but there is absolutely no reason for AMD to collaborate with Nvidia. The truth is that AMD is the only one that can serve this market.
From my understanding AMD holds the console market because its basically lowest price wins so the margins are business that Intel and NVIDIA doesn't really want.
You're saying AMD "only" won the "short-term" console market for 2013-2027 (so far) but instead they should... what? Focus on a 20-30 year time horizon? There's no such thing in the chip industry.
Well, there's motivation on AMD's part, but they also have a value proposition that nobody else could have matched. They can provide both the CPU and GPU on one chip, which simplifies the console designs pretty dramatically. More compact, easier to cool, etc.
Intel graphics solutions were (and remain) sub-par, and Nvidia has no x86 solutions (and their ARM chips would have been underpowered).
You're overselling the importance of console chips for AMDs bottom line. Console chips have notoriously low margins due to being custom in nature and cost down to oblivion, making their development an expensive PITA with very low margins.
It's why Intel and Nvidia refused to work with Sony and Microsoft for their console chips and only AMD took the original contract since they were close to bankruptcy at the time so every extra dollar mattered for them.
I'm not trying to start a debate here. It's obvious from your posts that you don't have any particular knowledge of AMD's console dealings, or even console dealings in general. You only speak to generalities which are well known among even casual observers of the industry. None of what you've said specifically refutes the original claim. I know you don't have any grounds to speak with any authority on the matter, and you know it too if you're honest with yourself.
Gaming and enthusiast machines are only a fraction of AMD's market, most consumers and clients didn't care about the features AMD's marketing department lied about.
Exactly, there's a reason that Xbox and PlayStation are both using AMD chips. What those systems needed was a lot more GPU power than CPU power, so AMD was well positioned to do that.
It's not a massive money maker for them, but I think that it positioned them well to push open standards like FreeSync, and Mantle/Vulcan. AMD is also fighting back by trying to develop open standards, knowing that proprietary ones wouldn't ever get any traction.
I feel like people forget that AMD has huge contracts with Microsoft, Valve, Sony, etc to design consoles at scale. It's an invisible provider as most folks don't even realize their Xbox and their Playstation are both AMD.
When you're providing fab designs at that scale, it makes a lot more sense to folks that companies would be willing to try a more affordable option to nVidia hardware.
Maybe their desktop and server CPUs aren't so hot right now, but I don't think you have to worry about AMD for a while. All of the current generation of consoles have AMD GPUs, those GPUs are on the same die as an AMD CPU for two of the three (PS4 and Xbone), AMD GPUs remain competitive with NVidia's offerings, and they seem to be winning mindshare with their lower-level Mantle graphics API.
EDIT: And the whole Bitcoin-mining thing (or Litecoin/Dogecoin mining thing, these days), as mentioned in another thread.
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