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> 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. As for

> 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. As for PC gaming, word of mouth plus a huge chunk of money for advertising deals. AMD, or back then rather ATI, drivers were always known for being more rough around the edges and unstable, but the cards were cheaper. Basically you get what you pay for. On the CPU side, it's just the same but without the driver stuff... until AMD turned the tide with Zen and managed to kick Intel's arse so hard they haven't recovered until today. The console market is a different beast, here the the show isn't run by kids who have had NVIDIA sponsorships in games since they were first playing Unreal Tournament 2004 but by professional beancounters who only look at the price. For them, the answer is clear: - generally, the studios prefer something that has some sort of market adoption because good luck finding someone skilled enough to work on PowerPC or weird-ass custom GPU architecture. So the console makers want something that their studios can get started on quickly without wasting too much time porting their exclusive titles. - on the CPU side there's only two major architectures left that fulfill this requirement, ARM and x86, and the only one pulling actual console-worthy high performance out of ARM is Apple who doesn't license their stuff to anyone. That means x86, and in there there's again just two players in town, and Intel can't compete on price, performance or efficiency => off to AMD they go. - on the GPU side it's the same, it's either AMD and NVIDIA, and NVIDIA won't go and use their fab time to churn out low-margin GPUs for consoles when they can use that fab time to make high-margin gamer GPUs and especially all the ludicrous-margin stuff for first coin miners and now AI hyper(scaler)s => off to AMD they go. The exception of course is the Nintendo Switch. For Nintendo, it was obvious that it must be an ARM CPU core - x86 and performance under battery constraints Just Is Not A Thing and all the other mobile CPU archs have long since died out. Where I have zero idea is why they went for NVIDIA Tegra that was originally aimed at automotive and settop boxes instead of Qualcomm, Samsung or Mediatek but I guess that the former two demanded inacceptable terms (Qualcomm), didn't want to sell low-margin SoCs when they could run their own high-performance SoCs for their Galaxy lineup (Samsung) or were too sketchy (Mediatek), so they went for Nvidia who could actually use a large deal to showcase "we can also do mobile" for a world that was dominated by the three before-mentioned giants.

Dalewyn 3y ago
>until AMD turned the tide with Zen and managed to kick Intel's arse so hard they haven't recovered until today. Let's not revise history. Zen was better than Bulldozer, but it still took until Zen2+ or Zen 3 (I don't recall exactly) until they reached parity with Intel Core i. Before that, the vocal crowd was buying AMD because they are the underdog (and still are, to a point) and were cheaper (no longer the case).
- kcb 3y ago
  The big factor is before Zen it was dual-core low-end, quad-core high-end for Intel consumer chips on both the desktop and laptop. Advancement in core count and multi-threaded performance clearly was a direct result of Zen.
- MindSpunk 3y ago
  If we're going to not revise history it's probably important to not leave out the actual meat of what made AMD's Zen processors so compelling: core count. Zen 1 launched offering double the core count of any of Intel's competing products at the same price. Intel was ahead on single core performance for a long time but in any well multi threaded benchmark or app Intel was getting absolutely demolished, with AMD offering twice the performance Intel was at any pricepoint. Intel failed to compete in multithreaded apps for 4 product generations, giving AMD enough time to close the single threaded performance gap too. Now they are both pretty close performance wise, but AMD is well ahead from a power efficiency standing compared to Intel's competing CPUs.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >Intel failed to compete in multithreaded apps for 4 product generations Sure, and they got away with it because multi-thread workloads aren't relevant for the vast majority of the population. They still aren't today. Most consumer computing workloads, including gaming by far, are dependent on single-thread performance. The vast majority of people do not spend their computing hours encoding video, compiling source code, or simulating proteins. They play games, surf Facebook, watch Youtube, read Mysterious Twitter X, and chat or call friends and family on LINE/Discord/Skype/et al. In case you are detached from reality, I ask you to realize most peoples' computing needs today can be satisfactorily satisfied with an Intel N100. That's a two generations old 4 core, 4 thread CPU among the lowest tiers of consumer CPUs availabe. Hell, I personally can satisfy all my daily computing needs with an Intel i7-2700K Sandy Bridge CPU without feeling hindered. I surmise most people will be satisfied with far less. Another way to put it is: For all the core counts AMD Ryzen (and now Intel) brought, most people can't actually make full use of them even today. That's another reason why AMD Ryzen took so long to become a practical competitor to Intel Core i instead of a meme spread by the vocal minority.

Dalewyn 3y ago

>until AMD turned the tide with Zen and managed to kick Intel's arse so hard they haven't recovered until today. Let's not revise history. Zen was better than Bulldozer, but it still took until Zen2+ or Zen 3 (I don't recall exactly) until they reached parity with Intel Core i. Before that, the vocal crowd was buying AMD because they are the underdog (and still are, to a point) and were cheaper (no longer the case).

kcb 3y ago
The big factor is before Zen it was dual-core low-end, quad-core high-end for Intel consumer chips on both the desktop and laptop. Advancement in core count and multi-threaded performance clearly was a direct result of Zen.
MindSpunk 3y ago
If we're going to not revise history it's probably important to not leave out the actual meat of what made AMD's Zen processors so compelling: core count. Zen 1 launched offering double the core count of any of Intel's competing products at the same price. Intel was ahead on single core performance for a long time but in any well multi threaded benchmark or app Intel was getting absolutely demolished, with AMD offering twice the performance Intel was at any pricepoint. Intel failed to compete in multithreaded apps for 4 product generations, giving AMD enough time to close the single threaded performance gap too. Now they are both pretty close performance wise, but AMD is well ahead from a power efficiency standing compared to Intel's competing CPUs.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Intel failed to compete in multithreaded apps for 4 product generations Sure, and they got away with it because multi-thread workloads aren't relevant for the vast majority of the population. They still aren't today. Most consumer computing workloads, including gaming by far, are dependent on single-thread performance. The vast majority of people do not spend their computing hours encoding video, compiling source code, or simulating proteins. They play games, surf Facebook, watch Youtube, read Mysterious Twitter X, and chat or call friends and family on LINE/Discord/Skype/et al. In case you are detached from reality, I ask you to realize most peoples' computing needs today can be satisfactorily satisfied with an Intel N100. That's a two generations old 4 core, 4 thread CPU among the lowest tiers of consumer CPUs availabe. Hell, I personally can satisfy all my daily computing needs with an Intel i7-2700K Sandy Bridge CPU without feeling hindered. I surmise most people will be satisfied with far less. Another way to put it is: For all the core counts AMD Ryzen (and now Intel) brought, most people can't actually make full use of them even today. That's another reason why AMD Ryzen took so long to become a practical competitor to Intel Core i instead of a meme spread by the vocal minority.