14 DAY TRIAL // Back in mid-March, NVIDIA said it had deliberately refused a deal with Sony for supplying the PlayStation 4 with GPUs. Now, however, AMD says that's not how things really happened.
People may or may not have heard how dismissive (at best) NVIDIA has been about Sony's latest gaming console.
In a nutshell, the Santa Clara, California-based company has been saying that the PS4 has weak specifications, with a low-end CPU (central processing unit) and low- to mid-range GPU (graphics processing unit).
To elaborate, NVIDIA says the SoC (system-on-chip) at the heart of the PS4, with its eight "Jaguar" CPU cores, a GCN GPU (Graphics CoreNext) and 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, is a low- to mid-range platform.
Toni Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA, is the one that said these things during an interview with TechRadar.
He also spoke to GameSpot in the past. "[NVIDIA] came to the conclusion [that it] didn’t want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay," he said.
Neal Robison, director of ISV relations at AMD, had some dismissive comments of his own, only that they were aimed at NVIDIA, not the PS4.
"It's not just about an x86 solution, but it's about that Jaguar APU where it's a combination of the graphics and CPU together and being able to create something that's greater than just putting an x86 PC-like architecture together," Robison explained.
In response to NVIDIA's Tony Tamasi saying that the specs of the PS4 are still outdated, Robinson said that "Well, of course they're going to do that. They're a little bitter."
That is to say, NVIDIA supposedly regrets not getting its way, or at least refusing to sign the deal that Sony offered in the first place.
We suspect this back-and-forth will continue for as long as the PS4 stays on the market, or at least the first year and a half.