The PS4 and Xbox One will have shorted life cycles, AMD says

Jun 7, 2014 04:41 GMT  ·  By

AMD, the hardware manufacturer behind the APUs in the recently launched PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, has suggested that their successors, the possible PlayStation 5 and next Xbox, could appear sooner rather than later, as the new generation of home consoles is bound to have a shorter life cycle.

The Xbox 360 was released back in 2005 while the PS3 made its debut in 2006, and since then the two home consoles have been neck and neck in terms of performance, although sales have painted a better picture for the Microsoft device.

After many years, the successors of the two platforms were released last November, in the form of the PS4 and the Xbox One.

The main winner with these new home consoles was AMD, surprisingly, as both devices include APUs from the CPU and GPU manufacturer, leading to quite a lot of profit for the company.

While talking with investors via BGR, AMD's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Devinder Kumar seemed to suggest that the PS5 and next Xbox are already being planned and might appear sooner rather than later.

"The life cycle of the products are probably going to be shorter," Kumar mentioned. "Our customers [i.e. Sony and Microsoft] are already thinking about what comes next. These are long life cycle products and as you know in the semi-custom space, you start with — three years before you introduce a product, a decision is made to use a particular company. In this case it was AMD."

The special partnership the company has with Sony and Microsoft has resulted in straight up profit, as all the expenses in research and development were paid by the two large corporations.

"Then you go ahead and co-develop the product with the funding dollars frankly, mostly coming from our customers. And then when you introduce the product, there is really no expenses from R&D standpoint, no sales and marketing dollars and whatever dollars you generate from a gross margin dollar standpoint, falls to the bottom-line and that’s what excites us."

The special PS4 and Xbox One partnership has put AMD in a good position in terms of semi-custom products and has even helped it secure deals for other products, although it's unclear if Kumar was talking about more games consoles or different devices.

Without a doubt the PS3 and Xbox 360 life cycle was way longer than anyone anticipated but Sony and Microsoft have made it clear that they want to delight PS4 and Xbox One owners for years to come.