I know... Dayum! She's purrr-fect :)

Nah, that would be illegal. The antitrust authorities would eat MS alive. You can be 100% sure that should this acquisition come to fruition, an army of lawyers would make sure to put a tight leash on MS and their policy towards companies that are AMD customers and MS competitors.

AMD don't make a huge amount on their console chips apparently, but they've really helped in a tough time for the company.

I wonder if these persistent rumours affect development of a shrunk PS4 APU and maybe PS5.

Intel in PS5 would be great for performance and energy efficiency. But as it stands they would need a separate GPU, probably from Nvidia. It would cost a bit more than the AMD alternative.

No.

There is exactly one reason: The contract between Sony and AMD to have the SoCs manufactured. This contract stays valid regardless of who owns AMD, and even if AMD ceased existing tomorrow, SoCs would continue to be produced - AMD doesn't produce them, TSMC and GloFo (an absolutely shitty foundry that gets NOTHING going - probably one of the very sources of AMDs problems)  do.

Someone has to be really naive to think that these scenarios (and  9999 other scenarios) are not sealed in the contract(s).

This MS / AMD rumour pops up roughly every other month. Why MS (a software company) would buy AMD (currently a disorganised hardware company) is beyond reasoning, but apparently it is good for clicks.

You killed the article.

The signs on the wall clearly say that XoCs are something of the past. While it is indeed cheaper to have everything on one die, you have to either compromise on CPU/GPU design rules or favour one over the other (GPUs in the current console SoCs). The future will be modular designs with HBM2,CPU(s),GPU(s) connected via interposers. More expensive than now for sure, but considerably more powerful.

I honestly can't think of a worse company to buy AMD (For consumers). This would not only massively limit who can get access to AMD's tech, but prop up other competing tech that is inferior. For instance these things could happen:

-Apple no longer has access to AMD GPU's that perform the advertised compute tasks in OpenCL FAR better than Nvidia
-Playstation, Nintendo and more no longer get a great SOC for their systems. As such inferior products get more of a chance being in consoles than they should.
-AMD products get shoehorned into anything that uses windows. Look I love AMD, but I don't want any manufacturer to get priority here.

LOL Nvidia is clearly dying to be part of the console market again.  They would give Sony an excellent deal on the next round just to prove to investors they havent been pushed out of a huge market.  Hell they could probably scale their Tegra cpu up enough to somewhat compete with AMD's cpu performance too.  Either that or Intel/qualcolm/apple A9X fills the void.

I figured if they bought AMD it would be less about what is going on in the console space, and more to do with creating custom chips for their own line of mobile products specifically phone, and tablets.

Hasn't apple gone this route for their phones , and tablets? would create more stable products, I'm sure these products would be the ones they sell through the MS store retail and digital, without all the third party bloatware seen on most 3rd party products.

Misleading title and the article itself has nothing to do with Playstation.

Why? The iGPUs that Intel makes are getting better and better. Skylake is capable of playing Witcher 3 with decent framerate just on the integrated GPU! Intel is clearly pushing hard in this department, who knows where they will be at in 2 years. We could see an Intel design in the PS5 if they can get the price right. What a blow to AMD would that be...