thismeintiel said:
czecherychestnut said:
GribbleGrunger said:
Perhaps 11m XB1 is actually right. I've been reading Gaf and it appears as if AMD is talking in terms of 'sold through' to customers and not 'shipped' in the sense we are normally used to:
We are pleased with the full-year performance of the semi-custom business and the strong sell-through reported by our customers. Nearly 30 million Sony and Microsoft consoles have now shipped.
Let me just clarify. In terms of the unit shipments, those are unit shipments from our customers to end users, and most of that is publicly available data from what Sony and Microsoft have published.
So relative to historical, I think most people will say that historically, the game console shipments in this generation are higher than in the previous generation. And you can come up with all kinds of reasons for that; some of that is the price points that they've chosen. I think that certainly helped the holiday season. Some of that is its software titles that are available at a given point in time.
I think the main thing is as we look at any holiday season, we want to make sure that there's not a lot of inventory that's sitting with our customers, and we see that that's fairly well balanced. So that gives us confidence as you go into 2015 and you see new titles that are launched, and those come out, that it should be a fairly normal market.
|
Here is the link to the earnings transcript where the above comes from: http://ir.amd.com/mobile.view?c=74093&v=200&d=2&id=5178684
Looks like it comes down to how much inventory is in the channel and what the sellthrough is. If PS4 shipments are at 19 million, it would make XB1 shipments around 11 million, which would still make sell-through less than 11 million, but in this case we are talking an overtrack of 300-500k, not 1 mil+ like we thought earlier
|
It's also kinda hard to know exactly what AMD considers nearly. Is it Sony's nearly, where they are just a few 10K-100K out. Or is it MS's recent nearly, where they were most likely 1M-2M away from their 10M figure.
|
By AMD's own verbatim, these are units shipped by Sony and MS ("our customers") to retailers ("end users"). Sony and MS only ship directly to final purchasers from their own stores, which is the vast minority of sales, and it makes no sense that AMD would know the sales data of their customer's customers. I work with chip suppliers, and they only ever ask what we will need and sell us the lot (We have to put the order in up front.). To build on that, Sony has publicly stated sell through to end users (us) for Q4Y14, but MS has not. MS has announced shipment numbers quite consistently, however, so the only logical conclusion I can draw is that this is a reference to shipments from MS and Sony to distributors.
