Monday, December 22, 2014

Nintendo's next console to be powered by AMD



With all three major consoles released in the last couple of years, AMD’s recent statement hinting at a new gaming design win raised eyebrows. Now, Nintendo has strongly suggested that they are working on new hardware. The surprise here isn’t that AMD’s powering it, but talks of it are coming less than 2 years from Wii U’s release.

Both Wiis have featured AMD GPUs, but IBM PowerPC CPUs. The latest, Wii U, is powered by a tri-core IBM PowerPC CPU, similar to previous-gen Xbox 360’s. The GPU is from the TeraScale era, which puts it a few generations behind. The two chips reside on a MCM module manufactued at 45nm by Renesas. Much of this puts the Wii U well behind its peers in terms of performance and efficiency. Despite beating PS4 and Xbox One to launch by a year, the Wii U has been outsold by both Xbox One and PS4 in half the time. With a stronger software line-up, it has shown signs of a recovery in 2014 however.

Nevertheless, it is not clear if this is a successor to the Wii U or a different product entirely. Also unclear is the timeline, although a 2016 release seems likely, which would mean only 4 years after Wii U’s release. While short for the console market, such a timeline is not unprecedented – Xbox 360 released within 4 years of Xbox. It will be interesting to see if this new console is powered by a semi-custom AMD APU with an entire SoC designed by AMD. Also, it could finally bring Nintendo to parity with Sony and Microsoft in terms of performance, or at least close to it. What we do know is AMD has this console generation wrapped up.

Source: Expreview, ********Image Source: Techshout



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