According to Reuters, Intel was also in the running, but ultimately lost to AMD.
A Reuters according to his exclusive report, in the case of the next-generation PlayStation, Sony did not automatically jump to AMD’s technology, as they did with the PlayStation 4 and 5, but for the first time in two generations, they competed with interested parties.
AMD understandably entered, but it looks like Intel was practically in the competition with them until the end, but at the same time, referring to three sources of Reuters, they claim that they lost the battle in 2022, so the new PlayStation series will also have a design developed by AMD will use. In principle, backward compatibility played a role in this, which was also very useful for the PlayStation 5 console family.
Reuters knows that Intel could have considered winning the next-generation PlayStation platform supplier contract as a great victory, since the console itself does not generate a significant profit, but it is a reliable source of income for about a decade, so it easily returns the investment. In addition, the giant from Santa Clara could have strengthened the contract manufacturing business with the orders from Sony, which would have meant a potential production batch of 100 million in terms of the current and the previous generation.
The mentioned media wrote, based on two sources, that Intel could not agree on how much profit the company could have taken home after manufacturing the system chip for Sony’s new console. They probably asked for too much, which was not accepted in Japanese. It is also interesting that Broadcom was also actively interested, but they dropped out of the competition before Intel.
In connection with the above, it is worth highlighting that as long as backward compatibility is so highly valued by the manufacturers for individual consoles, it is very difficult to replace the company that provided the hardware for the previous generation(s). Some characteristics of the known architecture can simply be carried over into the new design, so it becomes relatively easy to ensure compatibility at the software level. In the case of a completely new design, this is much more difficult, although it is not impossible, but it would involve disproportionately high costs, which is not very fortunate. So, the company that wants to take the new PlayStation and Xbox out of AMD’s hands, or the new Nintendo console out of NVIDIA’s hands, has to massively undercut the price so that even at the significant cost of backward compatibility, the platform change with significant differences is worth it to the manufacturers.
AMD and Broadcom did not respond to Reuters’ inquiries, while Intel disagreed with the report’s characterization, but declined to comment on existing and potential customer relationships.
Source: prohardver.hu
