> AMD’s acquisition of ATI is generally viewed as a strategic error.

Historically it was (when AMD was drowning in debt from the acquisition and had no competitive processors on the timeline), but is this still true? For instance, all of the major game consoles (ps4/ps5/xbone/xbox series x/switch) use AMD boards, and as I recall, those deals lifted the company's financials quite well.

It's complicated. The margins on console chips are lower than PC margins. When AMD had spare capacity (GloFo), that was great. But with everyone at TSMC and AMD demand high, those wafers could be used for more profitable chips. But the console deals definitely helped AMD in the dire times.

IMO, the strategic error was AMD paying a bunch of cash for ATI, instead of an all stock deal. In 2006, with their stock near the all time high (~$40) AMD decided to borrow $2B instead. Six months later, AMD is issuing shares at $14 to meet expenses. Two years later, AMD is trading at $1.50, and on the verge of bankruptcy. In retrospect, AMD's outcome could have been vastly different if they had done the all-stock deal in 2006, or even issued shares instead of borrowing.

It's possible they offered shares behind closed doors and were turned down though.

Right, but AMD could have issued shares to the public, then paid cash with the proceeds, if ATI insisted. We don't really know what happened.

AMD still uses GloFo

Only for IOD and some low end APU.

Agreed, although Switch uses NVidia Tegra, not AMD this generation.

For now they do, honestly it would make more sense to maybe consider an AMD SoC.

I would be a little surprised if they switched off of ARM. Even the Steam Deck with its custom AMD SoC is much closer to laptop specs and wattages than the switch e.g. 20w+ SoC, more than 2x battery capacity vs Switch. The switch has a lot more in common with phones than it does with other consoles or PC portables so IDK if we will see AMD SoCs with the right power profile for nintendo's needs.

Nintendo could use one of the new Samsung SoCs with RDNA2 graphics though. Those could be pretty good competition for Tegra X* chips.

I said that it would make more sense because they would open their platform to a lot more games, maybe it would cut a lot of dev work, and they'd might to it with competitive prices (like the Steam Deck has shown).

Now, Nintendo doesn't care much about that because they're into their own thing, they don't even see themselves as a tech or gaming company, the position themselves as an entertainment company.

Like, I think they see themselves closer to Disney than to Sony Computer Entertainment.

About the power profile, the switch came out with around 2h-3h battery life while gaming, depending on the game of course, I don't think it would be much of a problem.

Half or so of all Switch games are already made with Unity and I don't think Switch not being x86 is the reason most other games are not ported to Switch.

AMD has ARM licenses (IIRC, both architectural and for IP cores) and has shipped an Arm Cortex-A52 SoC in the past (Opteron A1100). If Nintendo really wanted, they might be able to order an Arm SoC from AMD directly. But yeah, going with Samsung would be far more practical.

Problem is, many existing Switch games use some nvidia-specific API (IIRC called "NVN" or whatever) instead of Vulkan.

It's interesting to think about. I'm not so sure myself; yes, an AMD chip would probably yield better GPU performance, but people forget that Nvidia just flat-out has the better software stack. Would games like Red Faction have made it to Switch without CUDA physics? Would No Man's Sky be viable on Switch without leveraging it's massive optimization stack for Nvidia hardware? How about the Borderlands collection and it's extensive use of PhysX?

I can see where the case for AMD could be made (the Steam Deck's APU is truly impressive), but I think Nintendo has invested pretty heavily into the Nvidia stack at this point. The Tegra boards that they made the original Switches with were left over from the Nvidia Shield; nobody was sure if the concept would take off or not. Now that the Switch has outsold the Wii, I'd imagine Nvidia and Nintendo are working very closely to design a successor to the chip, even if it's not going to be a mobile console.

> Would No Man's Sky be viable on Switch without leveraging it's massive optimization stack for Nvidia hardware? How about the Borderlands collection and it's extensive use of PhysX?

To be fair, developers have been making games run on underspecced AMD hardware for more than a decade at this point between the XBox One and PS4, and any games coming to PC have to have AMD alternatives to CUDA physics, PhysX, etc. anyway.

Also, its not like the AAA ports have been without issues, many of them run poorly and look pretty awful compared to first party efforts like BotW. Their optimization stack might be amazing, but recycling the shield SoC AND underclocking it is definitely causing some pain.

It does seem like Nintendo has buddied up to NVidia more than console manufacturers usually do so I think its likely they stick with NVidia but I wouldn't write off the possibility entirely, especially since AMD seems so willing to please with custom solutions even for much lower volume products like the Steam Deck.

Yeah, but even if you missed on some of those games that were made with the help of marketing budgets from NVIDIA (to use such proprietary tech), would on the other hand opened potentially the door to thousands of other games (if they went the x86 rout).

Probably one the of the best things that happened to the gamedevs, console wise, was Microsoft and Sony going for x86 and AMD SoC.

What you're saying, which is true, is that Nintendo likes to cut costs and it's cheap on the hardware they use because they care more about the content for their IP, not much for the tech behind it. They could keep stretching the switch for 3/5 or more years if they wanted to.

Ah, sorry, my mistake!

As already mentioned, not the Switch.

A few of these are pre-acquisition but the GPU's for the xbox 360, Gamecube, Wii, and Wii U were all ATI/AMD as well.

I'm sure at this point more console hardware has been AMD than any other manufacturer.

Console deals are terrible margin - there is a reason AMD won all those deals. If you have competitive chips, you would rather use your silicon otherwise.

Terrible margin for the console manufacturer (Sony, MS, Nintendo).. do we have any evidence that they're terrible margin for component manufacturers? Presumably these consoles wouldn't be sold at a loss if the components were bargain basement as you imply?

Also if we look at the latest gen, there's some pretty cutting edge architecture and manufacturing processes used in the new xbox/playstations. Zen2 is no slouch.

Everything I've heard about the Altera deal is that Intel has basically just been milking existing customers, rather than attracting new ones. If AMD does more with Xilinx sooner than they did with ATI[1] it could be good strategic move. If they start making FPGAs standard on their CPUs (short term on the enterprise stuff, longer term on everything) in the same way FPUs are, this could provide them with a significant advantage both in CPUs and GPUs. The other half of the equation would be to open up the FPGAs enough to allow 3rd party tool chains so that they could be at least as open as CPU ISAs. If they keep the Xilinx (and most other FPGA manufacturers) business model of 100% proprietary devices and toolchains, I think people will look back on this acquisition years from now the same way they do ATI and ask 'why?'. Basically it seems rather smart if they want the tech to enhance their existing offerings but rather dumb (especially for the price paid) to keep the FPGA business as a silo.

[1] The rationale of getting into the GPU business made a lot of sense but here we are 15 years later and it's arguable AMD has largely squandered the opportunity. Even in APUs where they should be slaughtering Intel, AMD continues to hobble them by putting previous gen GPU cores in them. This was during a decade and a half when Intel's iGPUs were fairly weak and nVidia had nothing to counter with... smart move AMD!

I don’t think the ATI acquisition was an error, integration has been harder than expected. The game concsoles would have been difficult wo having a world class GPU available.

The work they did around HSAIL and APUs shows that they have the creativity and the will.

I think integration was always going to be hard and most people who understood the problem knew that it was going to be hard/impossible but they went ahead with it anyways.

At the time they were talking about integrated compute units between CPU and GPU, mapping GPU register space into CPU address space, linking/unlinking CPU and GPU pipelines, etc etc. And the CPU and GPU teams would be working on this while also having to produce top-shelf stand-alone CPUs and GPUs to fight on 2 separate fronts against entrenched and capable competitors. It didn't really seem possible or even desirable at the time.

I also don't understand why having a GPU would improve their chances with console vendors. Those vendors could have still selected AMD CPUs but cut separate deals for the GPU with other companies. This is a business AMD is already and was already in. They do this in all sorts of markets like network switches.

Having an existing APU line makes the chances of success a whole lot higher.

I don't know what the grand plans were to have CPU and GPU teams both in a multiple level deep tick tock pipeline (organizations are structured like CPUs or CPUs are structured like assembly lines ... pick your causal metaphor). That would require the right fabric, I don't know if they have that yet. There is a ton of research that shows that a mediocre GPU on the same memory bus as a CPU has a huge number advantages over a GPU on the PCIe bus, even at x16. With HBM, hell put the GPU in the HBM. All HSAIL the HBM!

CPU, GPU and FPGA will all merge into a computational goo. With AMD acquiring Xilinx and their past with APUs and HSA, I stand by my statement. AMD has been stalling on the G series Ryzen parts because I think they don't want to cannibalize their discrete GPU business, but CPUs have more than enough compute and memory bandwidth to support software geometry and rasterization.

https://moorinsightsstrategy.com/the-real-reasons-microsoft-...

Intel sold power electronics group(?) for 85 million dollar, that Altera bought for 140 million: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16257/mediatek-subsidiary-to-...

I also know that many clients ditched SoCs with ARM cores from Altera when Intel acquired it being afraid that Intel does not like these alien cores.

Is it still? I thought the ability to produce semi-custom APUs for game consoles more or less saved AMD when they were unable to compete in the CPU market.

> Has Intel done anything with Altera? I’m curious.

To me Intel taking over Altera and removing the Altera name was a mistake. I don't associate the name "Intel" with FPGA's nor do I think they have a real interest in them beyond server acceleration. To me, Altera and their product line are dead.

I don't know what AMD will do to Xilinx but I hope it isn't more of the same hype driven nonsense of ML/AI/Crypto/Cloud chasing. And it will be sad to see the Xilinx name disappear.

Opinions on it are definitely mixed. It's an all stock deal that was made at a very reasonable price, but 1.5 years on they are overpaying by a huge amount. Xilinx has been doing very well compared to Intel's FPGA division, so you can try to justify it, but from a shareholder perspective it's very dilutive.

There are some interesting datacenter interconnect implications, especially around the new CXL spec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute_Express_Link

I see it as a data center play. SmartNic, DPU, etc. I'd love to play with a FPGA co-processor in my workstation, but I doubt that is the goal.