AMD Confident in Delivering Enough Chips for PlayStation 4, Xbox One Chips

From X-bit Labs: While in the past Advanced Micro Devices had problems with certain design wins when it simply could not meet the demand for certain product models, the firm is confident it can deliver enough chips for next-generation consoles from Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. Meeting demand for such chips will guarantee AMD rather hefty revenue stream, not meeting them will ruin the strategy of the company.

"From a manufacturing perspective, in a year we ship tens of millions of units. So we have a very strong manufacturing base for our APUs and discrete graphics. We leverage the same manufacturing infrastructure to develop for game consoles. So the volumes were not something that actually raised an eyebrow for us, because we're already in high-volume manufacturing," said Saeid Moshkelani, vice president of AMD and the general manager of the company’s semi-custom business unit, in an interview with Games Industry web-site.

For AMD, meeting demand for accelerated processing units that power Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 is crucial since its future in many ways depends on it.

Christopher Rolland, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets believes that APUs for next-gen video game consoles can add AMD around $900 million in new revenue annually in the following years. By contrast, AMD’s micro-server endeavor that involves acquisition of SeaMicro and licensing of ARM Cortex-A50 technology will $300 million to the annual revenue by 2015.

In addition to direct profits and revenues from the console business, AMD will also have other indirect benefits from putting its CPU and GPU architectures into next-gen consoles. For example, all AAA video games will be developed aiming AMD architectures on the first place, a huge trump in the battle against Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp.

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