I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market

I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor.

If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia.

A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?

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wongarsu 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon

They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a couple hardware configurations, making it viable to take advantage of such hardware features

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theresistor 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.

Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.

	▲	bee_rider an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And they’ve been in a rough spot at various times in the past, which probably made them willing to negotiate with the console companies. Actually looking at this thread, there’s a lot of good reasons they were the go-tos for consoles. Consoles seem to be in rough shape at the moment, I wonder if part of that is that AMD has been doing too well since Zen, haha.

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philistine 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You’re approaching this as if every company had the same corporate intentions.

Nvidia never cared much for those types of deals. They preferred to lose Apple as a business than to admit fault, they’ve always refused to compete on price for the business of Sony and Microsoft’s consoles. They’re adamant to beat at the sound of their own drum.

	▲	genxy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Nvidia was so thirsty for an x86 license, for years, that it wouldn't consider anything else.