14 DAY TRIAL // An AMD executive has talked about the components offered by the company for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and confirmed that the hardware maker was the only one equipped to offer such solutions for both Sony and Microsoft.
While the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 saw their components come from Nvidia, in the case of the PS3, and from AMD, in the case of the Xbox 360, their upcoming replacements – the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – both use APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) from AMD.
According to AMD's Lisa Su, who talked during the Citi Global Technology Conference via SeekingAlpha, the company had experience in the console business and it was targeted by both Sony and Microsoft for its x86 technologies.
"So the game console market is a very exciting market to us for a number of reasons. We have had history certainly through part of ATI into AMD where we licensed some of our graphics technology. When you look at going from the last generation of game console to this generation of game console it was necessary to provide a substantial performance improvement going forward," she said.
"And so the game console vendors were looking for a partner that could incorporate the highest performance graphics with the CPU capability, in this case X86 as well as fully semicustom design."
AMD was also thrilled by this opportunity, as it could diversify its earnings and show off its APU experience, even going so far as to say that it was the only company capable of doing this.
"So great opportunity for us, allows us to showcase our APUs, using our APU technology really providing some unique solution and in this particular case although Sony and Microsoft are both in the game console market, they’re very different solutions, they are fully custom solutions optimized to each companies’ vision," Su added.
"So it’s something that I would say AMD can offer uniquely and it’s one of our largest growth opportunities certainly in the near term but also it’s a nice seven year cycle and so it does well for us in terms of long term growth potential."
Nvidia has already talked about its disappearance from the console business and classified the current deals accepted by AMD as unsatisfactory.