AMD looking more & more to be providing silicon for the NX

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Pemalite said:

Soundwave said:

To be honest at this stage, a AMD 'vanilla' Nintendo console would just be kinda boring anyway.

From an end-user perspective, it wouldn't really be any different.

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Agree, most people don't even know what's inside PCs they buy, let's not even mention even more consumer electronics.

Pemalite said:

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Alby_da_Wolf said:

A really differend thing could be AMD finally entering the ARM market full steam with competitive k12+Polaris based APUs and SoCs, and on a wider range than currently expected. NVidia and Intel can make really powerful stuff, but they often end up being too expensive for mainstream products, they were for MS, let alone Ninty, that wants to become profitable on HW asap, possibly from launch, and rarely waives this unwritten rule, and only if forced to (for example when it had to heavily cut 3DS price a few months after launch).

AMD doesn't really have the resources for a full ARM push at the moment, not with Zen and Vega being their main focus with their limited resources.
Plus they are also re-organizing the entire company, seperating it's Graphics and CPU departments.

Besides, ARM is a very congested market now... Especially with Chinese chip makers entering into the fray with the likes of Rockchip, Allwinner, MediaTek, HiSilicon, Spreadtrum and more.
Can't forget Qualcom, Samsung and the hundreds of other ARM Licensee's... And it makes you wonder if a company like AMD should be bothered entering the market?
Let's not forget either that ARM chips are low-profit, low-cost compared to x86.

Plus AMD needs to refine Graphics Core Next to go ultra mobile and have Tegra-levels of performance and power consumption, that's at-least 3+ years away as there are various technology's AMD would need to implement which requires massive changes to the chips architecture, nVidia successfully did this a few years ago.

AMD would be in a better position if it simply licensed out it's graphics technology to an ARM chip company and work with them, they already spun off their ultra-mobile, Radeon derived "Adreno"  tech/company to Qualcom once before.

True, ARM isn't an ideal market for AMD, but even starting in the ways you suggest, AMD should consider it for many reasons.
The most important one is that x86 market growth is slowing (although the PC user base still always grows, as people keep their PCs working a lot longer) and it could eventually become stationary or even shrink, if in the future ARM devices will replace PCs for some PC uses, the second and third are that despite offering lower profit, low cost could be positive for AMD, and even more positive it would be that strong competition is balanced by the absence of an overwhelming market leader as Intel is in x86 market. A fourth reason could be that low profit, low cost and not even remotely being one of the market leader, let alone enjoying an overwhelmingly dominating position, makes ARM market even less ideal for Intel than for AMD.