AMD Releases ROCm 4.2 Compute Stack

[smitty3268]

It would be interesting to know how much profit AMD is making off each XBox and PS5 sold. I'm guessing it's not nearly as much as their dGPUs, but I honestly can't say.

It's well known that the console market is a high-volume but low-profit per chip market. That's the primary reason Nvidia and Intel were never particularly interested in fighting AMD to get it. Profits on their own chips are going to be far more profitable than what they're getting paid by Sony and Microsoft.

I've heard many people claim that AMD is handling the production of the XBox and PS5 APUs, but I wonder if this is an assumption or based on any evidence. Even if it's true, AMD is operating by contract, which means they're subject to certain supply obligations. Therefore, I'm sure they're not just at liberty to prioritize their own products ahead of MS and Sony's.

It is public knowledge that MS/Sony don't pay TSMC directly, and they are paying AMD a lot of money. So their chips come out of AMD's share of TSMC production. It's all defined by contract though. I assume they are contracted to provide a certain # of working chips per month and it's up to AMD to figure out how many wafers that requires (or maybe it's just a certain number of wafers that is required, I'm not sure). You can be certain that AMD is trying to prioritize their own chips as much as possible since they'll make far more profit on those.

[coder]

because of the ISA war with intel games always used the next intel only version of the ISA...

1. I doubt game developers can lock out people with Intel CPUs 1-2 generations old. So, it's not going to be the very latest ISA revision.
2. Intel didn't add any new instructions to mainsteam desktop CPUs between Skylake and Rocket Lake. And Ryzens supported basically all the Skylake instructions.

but AMD/ATI did find a hole in the intel/nvidia defence it was the gaming consoles of sony/MS because the developers where used to end up in programm low level and optimize the game for exactly the hardware of the console. this means it was the only way to sell gaming gpus and cpus without going into "nvidia the way its meant to be played" walled garden fight with nvidia or ISA war against intel.
and this war is still going on but because playstation/xbox is based on AMD hardware nearly all game developers become used to in the end support amd hardware.

There are two problems with this theory:

1. Playstation uses its own graphics API. So, games have to be ported across APIs, when porting between PCs and Playstation consoles. A lot of the optimizations might therefore get lost.
2. The people doing console ports are rarely the game's original developers. Game companies contract out this work. I heard this from a very good authority on the matter, when I asked about the very thing you're claiming.

this means from AMD side this is an strategic decision to fight nvidia/intel and because of this AMD sells the chips very cheap to Sony/MS...

You're just guessing. I'm sure you don't have a good source on any of it.

for AMD the game consoles are the way to stay in business even in times no one buy amd hardware on the pc market.

as i wrote you at top of my post here even if AMD makes ZERO money on gaming consoles it is of great importance to have this position.. because without it amd would be bankrupted long time ago.

Man, you're really contradicting yourself. So, if AMD doesn't make console chips for profit, then how can the revenue be enough to keep them alive? But, if they're doing it so that PC games will be better optimized for their GPUs, then why do you say they don't care about PC gaming?

It sounds to me like you need to get your story straight. It would help if you could cite some facts to bolster your case.