AMD Says Nvidia Are Salty Over PS4 Deal

Neal Robison, director of ISV relations at AMD, said last week during GDC 2013 that they’ve been waiting a long time to show off the APU powering the PlayStation 4. AMD has been working on the chip for years and they were extremely happy to finally unveil it.

In an interview with TechRadar, he spoke about the chip’s eight x86-64 low-power Jaguar cores and the accompanying Radeon HD GPU packed with 18 computing units.

“It’s not just about an x86 solution, but it’s about that Jaguar APU where it’s a combination of the graphics and CPU together and being able to create something that’s greater than just putting an x86 PC-like architecture together.”

He also said that thanks to their track record with the 360, the Wii and other consoles, Sony wanted in the AMD game. The reason why they switched over from Nvidia was because they wanted to take a different approach. Sony asked for a PC-like experience, in terms of the ease for developers, something the PS3 struggled with.

He then went on to say they could do things that Nvidia could not, like create an integrated solution with optimized information flows, therefore generating better performance, better power and heat efficiency. Robison also said they could provide the best tools and developer relationships that’ll make the PlayStation 4 an incredibly strong launch.

The Nvidia talk didn’t stop there however, as he then took shots at their comments regarding Sony’s switch to AMD. Tony Tamasi, Nvidia’s senior vice president of content and development, said that the consoles specs were already outdated and comparative to a low-end PC.

If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a Nvidia GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago.

Tamasi also threw in some comments about how they wanted nothing to do with Sony and the PlayStation 4, saying it wasn’t worth sacrificing their effort and resources from its other projects.

“Well, of course they’re going to do that,” Robison told TechRadar. “They’re a little bitter. For us, really by looking at that APU that we designed, you can’t pull out individual components off it and hold it up and say, ‘Yeah, this compares to X or Y.’ It’s more than just a CPU doing all these amazing calculations and a GPU doing calculations. We are now going to be able to move certain tasks between the two.”

Later on in the interview, he provided a slight wink that they’re involved with the next Xbox, whatever its name may be.

Source: TechRadar