Edit I'm not reading what Xbit is implying into AMD's words at all. I still think it's royalties.
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Well the reason for licensing is so AMD can't screw them over. See what Nvidia did to MS over the Xbox.
But I think these new chips as so complicated that AMD needs to be in charge of overseeing production? No one else has experience designing 32nm SOI chips.
In any case, AMD did this as a package deal: CPU, GPU and fabrication for X price. Their X price even with this was better than Intel's, IBM's, and so on. MS and Sony are not stupid. However AMD should make more money especially in the long-term, and don't expect console prices to come down as much.
Overall it's not a big deal.
@Cyborg13B The GPUs for both last-gen consoles were always made at TSMC. And I'm pretty sure AMD will be making these at Globalfoundries, they don't own their own capacity.
