4 ms·

A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous PCs tha

A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous PCs that have their chips in them. It's almost sickening enough to want them just to shutter their doors and give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's ass. In anycase, the whole microserver hype seemed a bit suspect from the start.

robzyb 12y ago
> A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. For a moment I agreed. But then I realised that it could be said that the reason they won the contracts is that their competitors didn't think it was profitable at that price.
- yepguy 12y ago
  Of course, but price doesn't just mean money. I think I read somewhere that AMD was willing to grant Microsoft & Sony more rights over the chips than their competitors. I don't know how much that was a factor though.
  - agapos 12y ago
    As I know, it went something like this: -Both wanted x86 for better usability (PS3 Cell was a hard-to-tame beast for many devs, ARM not strong enough) -Intel was not interested in manufacturing semi-custom chips -Nvidia simply did not have x86 licenses -AMD was left as the only option Of course other things also factored in the big picture, profit margins for example, but those are more known.
    - Narishma 12y ago
      They didn't necessarily want x86, it just happened that that was the only sensible option available at the time. What they really wanted was an SoC or APU as opposed to a discrete CPU and GPU, as that is a lot cheaper. And as you say, Intel is too expensive and has no good graphics, Nvidia only has ARM which isn't powerful enough, and IBM doesn't do graphics nor SoCs. Which left AMD which has good graphics, ok CPUs and the experience to put them together in an SoC.
  - mreiland 12y ago
    I've heard MS found bugs in the hardware, so it was probably a good decision.
    - kryptiskt 12y ago
      I remember when Matt Dillon (of Dragonfly BSD) did the same: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg00000.html http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg0... That's the result that you want after a long slog of debugging. It's not as fun to dig into something for 12h and finally find a misplaced parenthesis.
      - ableal 12y ago
        "I'm pretty stoked... it isn't every day that a guy like me gets to find an honest-to-god hardware bug in a major cpu!" I find Matt Dillon's enthusiasm and humbleness admirable. He's been active for donkey's years, pumping out stuff since the days of comp.os.amiga (if memory serves), and created his own filesystem and BSD distro, AFAIK not out of vanity but to do and share research. People like him should get more public recognition.
wmf 12y ago
A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous PCs that have their chips in them. AMD's "Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom" division made a profit, but it was more than wiped out by losses in other divisions. Consoles are a seasonal business and Q1 is a slow quarter after all the holiday sales in Q4. AMD's PC processors are so bad they generally have to sell them below cost to sell any at all. give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's ass. AMD won[1] two antitrust lawsuits against Intel already, but a billion-dollar settlement doesn't go very far when you're competing against Intel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v..... [1] Spare us the pedantry.
- MoOmer 12y ago
  That billion dollar settlement came after they had to close down their fabs due to the anti-competitive moves that Intel had made. A billion doesn't come close to the set-back it caused them. During that time, for those who don't remember, AMD literally couldn't give their chips away, because the vendor kickbacks from Intel still made Intel the better choice.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Indeed. Precisely why it's baffling that no one is currently looking at Intel's heavy subsidization of its mobile Atom chips. Now that they changed their financial structure to be able to hide those subsidies/losses by also selling $160 Atom-based "Pentiums" for PCs, it will be even harder to figure out what Intel is doing. They'll just call them "mobile chips", and the $30+ mobile Atom subsidy will now be masked by the $80+ "Pentium" (but still Atom) markup. Whoever would be looking at "how Atom is doing" all they'll see is that "those chips are profitable" - despite the fact in the actual mobile/smartphone market Intel is selling chips below-cost against the competition to try and steal market share from them. It's also a great way to hide billions upon billions of losses in the smartphone market for years from shareholders, because all the shareholders will see is that the "Client Group is profitable" thanks to the PC profit offset. By the time the antitrust bodies wake up to it, Intel will probably already take out a few ARM chip makers and have a significant market share in mobile (I'm still skeptical about that one, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel is playing very unfair right now and those tactics could help them greatly in the long term). It's also already too late to fix the damage Intel has done with its "bundled" GPUs in laptops against Nvidia and also AMD. In the first few years nobody cared because "Intel graphics suck anyway, and you'll need an Nvidia dedicated GPU for your laptop". So the fact that Intel essentially coerced OEMs into putting their crappy GPUs in laptops that nobody asked for or wanted, so that consumers get used to them, was completely ignored by antitrust bodies. But it was quite obvious to me even then that it would be just a matter of time before those GPUs got good enough to replace most Nvidia GPUs from laptops (hello disruptive innovation theory!). Now you see consumers everywhere actually ask to have the latest integrated Intel GPU - i.e. the damage is already done by its anti-competitive bundling tactics, and no fine will fix that unless we're talking $5+ billion given to Nvidia and AMD, or the antitrust bodies outright ban Intel from bundling its GPU with its CPUs anymore (highly unlikely, especially as now Intel will argue that doing so would cause "great harm to the performance/cost of its chips").
KaoruAoiShiho 12y ago
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4-because-console-margins-are-terrible http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4...
TheCondor 12y ago
IBM won all three consoles last time, PowerPC doesn't look particularly strong now, if anything it looks like it's dying. I assume the deal wasn't structured as a per chip sales deal but a design engagement that left ms, Sony and Nintendo free to make fabrication deals with their various design products with whomever can fab them. I could see Amd making similar deals where Intel wouldn't touch that. If they can develop a hugged ARM story, I could see that being compelling.

A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous PCs that have their chips in them. It's almost sickening enough to want them just to shutter their doors and give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's ass. In anycase, the whole microserver hype seemed a bit suspect from the start.

robzyb 12y ago

> A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. For a moment I agreed. But then I realised that it could be said that the reason they won the contracts is that their competitors didn't think it was profitable at that price.

yepguy 12y ago
Of course, but price doesn't just mean money. I think I read somewhere that AMD was willing to grant Microsoft & Sony more rights over the chips than their competitors. I don't know how much that was a factor though.
- agapos 12y ago
  As I know, it went something like this: -Both wanted x86 for better usability (PS3 Cell was a hard-to-tame beast for many devs, ARM not strong enough) -Intel was not interested in manufacturing semi-custom chips -Nvidia simply did not have x86 licenses -AMD was left as the only option Of course other things also factored in the big picture, profit margins for example, but those are more known.
  - Narishma 12y ago
    They didn't necessarily want x86, it just happened that that was the only sensible option available at the time. What they really wanted was an SoC or APU as opposed to a discrete CPU and GPU, as that is a lot cheaper. And as you say, Intel is too expensive and has no good graphics, Nvidia only has ARM which isn't powerful enough, and IBM doesn't do graphics nor SoCs. Which left AMD which has good graphics, ok CPUs and the experience to put them together in an SoC.
- mreiland 12y ago
  I've heard MS found bugs in the hardware, so it was probably a good decision.
  - kryptiskt 12y ago
    I remember when Matt Dillon (of Dragonfly BSD) did the same: http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg00000.html http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg0... That's the result that you want after a long slog of debugging. It's not as fun to dig into something for 12h and finally find a misplaced parenthesis.
    - ableal 12y ago
      "I'm pretty stoked... it isn't every day that a guy like me gets to find an honest-to-god hardware bug in a major cpu!" I find Matt Dillon's enthusiasm and humbleness admirable. He's been active for donkey's years, pumping out stuff since the days of comp.os.amiga (if memory serves), and created his own filesystem and BSD distro, AFAIK not out of vanity but to do and share research. People like him should get more public recognition.

wmf 12y ago

A bit OT, but I have never understood how AMD can win both the XBox and the PS4 chipset contracts and yet not be profitable. Not to mention the numerous PCs that have their chips in them. AMD's "Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom" division made a profit, but it was more than wiped out by losses in other divisions. Consoles are a seasonal business and Q1 is a slow quarter after all the holiday sales in Q4. AMD's PC processors are so bad they generally have to sell them below cost to sell any at all. give any cash they have to lobbyists to get the DOJ to go all antitrust on Intel's ass. AMD won[1] two antitrust lawsuits against Intel already, but a billion-dollar settlement doesn't go very far when you're competing against Intel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v..... [1] Spare us the pedantry.

MoOmer 12y ago
That billion dollar settlement came after they had to close down their fabs due to the anti-competitive moves that Intel had made. A billion doesn't come close to the set-back it caused them. During that time, for those who don't remember, AMD literally couldn't give their chips away, because the vendor kickbacks from Intel still made Intel the better choice.
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Indeed. Precisely why it's baffling that no one is currently looking at Intel's heavy subsidization of its mobile Atom chips. Now that they changed their financial structure to be able to hide those subsidies/losses by also selling $160 Atom-based "Pentiums" for PCs, it will be even harder to figure out what Intel is doing. They'll just call them "mobile chips", and the $30+ mobile Atom subsidy will now be masked by the $80+ "Pentium" (but still Atom) markup. Whoever would be looking at "how Atom is doing" all they'll see is that "those chips are profitable" - despite the fact in the actual mobile/smartphone market Intel is selling chips below-cost against the competition to try and steal market share from them. It's also a great way to hide billions upon billions of losses in the smartphone market for years from shareholders, because all the shareholders will see is that the "Client Group is profitable" thanks to the PC profit offset. By the time the antitrust bodies wake up to it, Intel will probably already take out a few ARM chip makers and have a significant market share in mobile (I'm still skeptical about that one, but that doesn't change the fact that Intel is playing very unfair right now and those tactics could help them greatly in the long term). It's also already too late to fix the damage Intel has done with its "bundled" GPUs in laptops against Nvidia and also AMD. In the first few years nobody cared because "Intel graphics suck anyway, and you'll need an Nvidia dedicated GPU for your laptop". So the fact that Intel essentially coerced OEMs into putting their crappy GPUs in laptops that nobody asked for or wanted, so that consumers get used to them, was completely ignored by antitrust bodies. But it was quite obvious to me even then that it would be just a matter of time before those GPUs got good enough to replace most Nvidia GPUs from laptops (hello disruptive innovation theory!). Now you see consumers everywhere actually ask to have the latest integrated Intel GPU - i.e. the damage is already done by its anti-competitive bundling tactics, and no fine will fix that unless we're talking $5+ billion given to Nvidia and AMD, or the antitrust bodies outright ban Intel from bundling its GPU with its CPUs anymore (highly unlikely, especially as now Intel will argue that doing so would cause "great harm to the performance/cost of its chips").

KaoruAoiShiho 12y ago

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4-because-console-margins-are-terrible http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/150892-nvidia-gave-amd-ps4...

TheCondor 12y ago

IBM won all three consoles last time, PowerPC doesn't look particularly strong now, if anything it looks like it's dying. I assume the deal wasn't structured as a per chip sales deal but a design engagement that left ms, Sony and Nintendo free to make fabrication deals with their various design products with whomever can fab them. I could see Amd making similar deals where Intel wouldn't touch that. If they can develop a hugged ARM story, I could see that being compelling.