AMD Says Nvidia is a Little Bitter Over PS4 Deal
AMD is now in Club PlayStation while Nvidia is standing outside in the cold.
Neal Robison, director of ISV relations at AMD, said last week during GDC 2013 that the company has been waiting a long time to introduce the APU that's powering Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4. AMD has been working on the chip for years, and to finally be able to talk about "a culmination of all this effort" is extremely rewarding for the nation's second biggest desktop CPU maker.
In an interview with TechRadar, he began boasting about the chip's eight x86-64 low-power Jaguar cores and the accompanying Radeon HD GPU packed with 18 compute units. "It's not just about an x86 solution, but it's about that Jaguar APU where it's a combination of the graphics and CPU together and being able to create something that's greater than just putting an x86 PC-like architecture together," he said.
He said Sony came knocking on AMD's door thanks to its previous track record with the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and other consoles. Sony chose Nvidia for the PlayStation 3, but the Japanese company wanted to take a different, more PC-like approach with the current console's successor. Sony wanted to offer a platform developers could easily use, a platform provided by AMD.
Unlike Nvidia, AMD could create an integrated solution with optimized information flows, Robison said, thereby generating better performance, better power and heat efficiency. AMD could best provide the tools and developer relationships that will give the PlayStation 4 an incredibly strong launch.
Robison then took a shot at Nvidia's recent statement about Sony using AMD instead of Nvidia. Tony Tamasi, Nvidia's senior vice president of content and development, said the console's specs are already outdated, that it sports hardware that is in the neighborhood of a low-end PC.
"If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago," he said. Later on he said that committing to the PlayStation 4 wasn't worth sacrificing pulling time and resources from its other projects.
"Well, of course they're going to do that," Robison told TechRadar. "They're a little bitter. For us, really by looking at that APU that we designed, you can't pull out individual components off it and hold it up and say, 'Yeah, this compares to X or Y.' It's more than just a CPU doing all these amazing calculations and a GPU doing calculations. We are now going to be able to move certain tasks between the two."
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Later on in the interview, he hinted to possible involvement with Microsoft's next console slated for a partial reveal this month, the Xbox Infinity (720). To read the full interview, head over to TechRadar here.
Given AMD and Sony's close ties with Android, could it be possible that the PlayStation 4 will allow users to run Android apps directly on the console via BlueStacks? That would be interesting...
Kevin Parrish has over a decade of experience as a writer, editor, and product tester. His work focused on computer hardware, networking equipment, smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and other internet-connected devices. His work has appeared in Tom's Hardware, Tom's Guide, Maximum PC, Digital Trends, Android Authority, How-To Geek, Lifewire, and others.
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Bloob The unified GDDR5 will surely help off-load tasks to appropriate hardware. PS4 won't blow anyone's mind but consoles rarely do anyways. It'll likely be almost half the price of a 680 alone anyways.Reply -
mobrocket yet if they got the contract, nvidia would say how the PS4 is revolutionary in gamingReply
price wise, u wont find a PC that can match the ps4 on gaming performance
most bang for your buck are consoles -
gggplaya Sure AMD could have built a powerhouse system with their latest PC graphics card technology, but no one is willing to pay $1000 for a console. Get real Nvidia, you're just jealous because you made a bad move.Reply
AMD will sell more video cards now, and sell a boatload of CPU/GPU's to playstation for the simple fact that games will be more easily port-able to PC and possibly the Xbox. Developers can generate much more revenue from each game they develope because they'll be offered to more demographics or systems.
AMD is looking to retake popularity, and pull more developers on board. So it's worth to time and resources to develop for the PS4. That's how you overtake and sustain a business. -
sarinaide Nvidia are also Jelly that they don't have girls with boobies doing their promo's :DReply
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matt_b Nvidia said otherwise in the aspect that it wasn't in-line with their current goals. Yet, everyone knows it's quite the opposite when you lose a big contract/stream of income like Sony can provide.Reply -
Memnarchon BloobIt'll likely be almost half the price of a 680 alone anyways.Have you ever seen for over a decade a competitive console (especially the Playstation) to be launched with a price less than $400-500? I don't.Reply
Do you think that at december GTX680 will cost $1000? I think with the arrival of the HD8xxx and the GTX7xx, GTX680 will have the fate of GTX480. After a few weeks you could find it for $260...
Also the Myth that consoles cost less, is just a fairytale for kids. The PC is a tool for many things, work, entertainment, educational, internet browsing etc etc. The only thing you can compare with a console is the gpu. Is your office desktop a gaming machine? I don't think so. But when you put it a $150 HD7850 or GTX650ti boost, it becomes a gaming machine far better than the ones you can buy today with consoles. Not to mention the prices of the games also... -
sarinaide AMD have unified the platforms with the APU, this will bring the benefits of developers and partnerships. Grow relations with Sony and Microsoft which are big money spinners and bring ancillory benefits.Reply
The APU represents the most architecturally advanced microarchitecture and Nvidia doesn't have anything close to it so when MS and Sony shopped around they stumbled onto what is just hands down the most effiecient way to high end on die performance. -
greenmachineiijh No matter what platform you choose, it will be an exceptional experience and ALWAYS has been. You can not compare a gaming PC (or the hardware) to a console anyway. A console is dedicated hardware. No overhead, no OS, nothing to drag it down. And direct hardware access by the developers which is not possible on a PC.Reply
Easy enough math... -
de5_Roy windows rt failing in sales (surface rt is powered by tegra3), psvita underwhelming, apple monopolizing tsmc's 20nm node, amd getting off their lazy asses and improving gcn drivers, intel making a move to lock out discreet cards in the future, odms going for qualcomm socs instead of nvidia's - nvidia isn't just a little bitter. :DReply -
scannall nVidia was never in the running, so I don't know why they made the snide comments they did earlier. While they are great on the GPU side, they just can't make an x86 CPU. Something the developers were demanding. Nor a CPU with enough power to drive a console, at a reasonable price.Reply