AMD has won the contract to produce the chip for Sony’s next big games console, the PS6, according to a new report.
Reuters claims that Intel lost out on the contract to design and build the core chip for Sony’s PlayStation 6 console back in 2022, with AMD winning this particular two horse race.
It comes as a huge blow to Intel’s relatively new contract manufacturing business, which was announced back in 2021. According to the report, Intel’s quibbling over the amount of profit it could take from each chip sold to Sony cost it in the end.
This can be seen as good news for gamers, or at least those who appreciate the ability to play older games. With AMD winning the PS6 gig, it should prove easier to ensure backwards compatibility, with the PS5 and brand new PS5 Pro (pictured) also running on AMD hardware.
Indeed, it seems likely that this matter of backwards compatibility was another significant factor in Sony’s decision over the PS6 powerplant. The report claims that this was “a subject of discussion between Intel and Sony engineers and executives”, and that ensuring backwards compatibility using an Intel chip “would have been costly and taken engineering resources”.
Given the backlash to Sony’s sky high pricing for the PS5 Pro, cost is likely to be a major factor in the PlayStation 6 console’s potential success. With profit margins famously tight on console launches, ploughing extra resources into ensuring backwards compatibility would have likely represented an unwelcome extra cost that would probably have been passed on to the consumer.
The PS5 Pro was announced last week, with a bolstered GPU set to enable games to effectively run on performance mode (which mostly means 60fps) without sacrificing visual detail and advanced lighting effects.
It remains to be seen what the PS6 can add to this, but now we appear to know that there’ll be some level of continuity with AMD’s involvement.
