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Topic: 3DS successor most likely to use AMD tech - AMD exec hinting at a deal

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Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chief technology officer Mark Papermaster and VP of AMD's semi-custom chip business Saeid Moshkelani are interviewed.
Saeid Moshkelani stops just short of actually saying Nintendo's next handheld will be powered by AMD technology. They have a number of design wins for future products in the pipeline. It sounds like they have a deal with Nintendo, or that one is in the works.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2014/06/10/amds-pape...

Last week I sat down with Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Saeid Moshkelani, a vice president overseeing what AMD calls its “semi-custom” chip business, the division that produced the parts for Microsoft‘s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4.

We met in the vast former office of that inimitable, colorful Silicon Valley pioneer, AMD founder Jerry Sanders. With its massive round conference table, oak desk, and a bathroom bigger than most Manhattan apartments, it is like meeting in the Oval Office.

Papermaster, who is 53 and joined in 2011 after stints with Cisco Systems, IBM and Apple, emphasized the point that AMD is no longer a company tripping over itself just to get product out the door.

His customers, such as Microsoft and Sony, foot a portion of the bill for his R&D. The result of that is that while there is a lower gross margin for such chips than for standard chips AMD sells, there is a very nice operating margin, he says.

But it is not worth doing a project, even with the customer subsidizing some up-front expense, if it won’t be likely to produce a winning product that ships in decent volume.

“Has to be at least $100 million annual revenue for us to go for it,” says Moshkelani. That’s a minimum, he explains, not a target. In fact, the company has already said it expects to secure two more design wins ranging from $250 million to half a billion in value, “that are already in the pipeline.” The $100 million is a “floor,” if you will, that any potential deal has to rise above.

In the case of the console chip business, “We pursued Xbox and PS4 unwaveringly,” he says. The payoff from proven product cycles with long lifespans was extremely attractive to the semi-custom business.
“It was a natural extension of our IP — game consoles are extremely graphics intensive, and so it was a very good fit.”

So what are some other targets?

Another area of interest for semi-custom is handheld gaming, believe it or not. “Everyone thinks it is dead, but the [Nintendo] 3DS is still selling.”

So, obviously AMD's Saeid Moshkelani cannot come out and say it directly, it is left up to AMD's customer (in this case, Nintendo) to decide when, where and how an announcement is made for their product.

If Nintendo's next handheld is powered by AMD, you can bet their next console will be as well, since Nintendo has been working for several years now to have a common, shared architecture, OS, and programming environment for their next generation platforms which will succeed 3DS and Wii U.

BTW this does not rule out what Iwata said about the next generation absorbing Wii U's architecture.

I would not expect 3DS's successor to be released next year, but Q2/Q3 2016 would seem reasonable. Remember, the GBA had about 3.5 years on the market before Nintendo released the original DS (GBA in mid 2001 to late 2004 with DS).

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It means an AMD APU of some sort for Nintendo's next handheld.

The next Nintendo console would likely feature a larger, faster, more powerful APU with higher performance, resolution, etc. (as powerful as PS4 if not more so since it's coming out years after PS4).

Yet both the new handheld and console can be programmed for in the same way, saving development time and thus allowing more games to come out more often than is the case with 3DS and Wii U, which use totally different architectures.

This would be what Iwata has been talking about since the beginning of 2013.

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Bolt_Strike

Someone tell me what this means in English, I don't speak tech.

Bolt_Strike

Switch Friend Code: SW-5621-4055-5722 | 3DS Friend Code: 4725-8075-8961 | Nintendo Network ID: Bolt_Strike

ScrollingLayers

Simply put, the same "family" of tech in both Nintendo's next handheld, and their next console. The console would be more powerful, but games could be developed for both, much faster. Instead of developing completely different games for handheld and console, like with 3DS and Wii U now.

Is that easy enough to understand ?

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Bolt_Strike

Yeah, I understand it now.

So I guess this backs up what Nintendo was saying back in January that they'll both be "like brothers".

Bolt_Strike

Switch Friend Code: SW-5621-4055-5722 | 3DS Friend Code: 4725-8075-8961 | Nintendo Network ID: Bolt_Strike

ScrollingLayers

Kewl.

Yeah, I think it certainly backs up what Nintendo was saying, that they would both be "like brothers".

It would also back up what Nintendo said in January of 2013, and what they had started doing as far back as 2012.

Iwata said:

As you might already know from some newspaper reports, we will reorganize our development divisions next month for the first time in nine years. Two divisions which have independently developed handheld devices and home consoles will be united to form the Integrated Research & Development Division, which will be headed by Genyo Takeda, Senior Managing Director.

Last year we also started a project to integrate the architecture for our future platforms. What we mean by integrating platforms is not integrating handhelds devices and home consoles to make only one machine. What we are aiming at is to integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferrable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform. They will also work to avoid software lineup shortages or software development delays which tend to happen just after the launch of new hardware.

Some time ago it was technologically impossible to have the same architecture for handheld devices and home consoles and what we did was therefore reasonable. Although it has not been long since we began to integrate the architecture and this will have no short-term result, we believe that it will provide a great benefit to our platform business in the long run. I am covering this topic as today is our Corporate Management Policy Briefing.

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/130131/05.html

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Now what that will mean for us, as gamers, as far as what Nintendo's next handheld and console platforms will look like, and be like, obviously we just don't know yet.

Nintendo themselves are most likely still in the process of figuring that out. I doubt anything is completely set in stone.

It's not as if we get to buy these new systems within a year. 3DS still has life in it, and Nintendo is committed to keeping Wii U owners happy. Nintendo is not going to pull a SEGA.

I wouldn't expect the next console to be even revealed until sometime after the new Zelda for Wii U has been released around the fall of 2015. So a reveal sometime in 2016, at the soonest

That said, there was a large gap between the time Wii U was revealed (E3 2011) and when it was released (Fall 2012). Going by how Sony was so successful with PS4's reveal and release in the same year (Feb 2013 and Nov 2013) I wouldn not at all be surprised if Nintendo shortens the gap between the reveals and the releases of both the next handheld and the next console.

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Bolt_Strike

I think what it means is more crossbuy and crossplay, you can buy a game on one and play it on either console. Now in terms of release date, if they're going to release them close together, I think a 2016 reveal and a 2017 release is about right. I think they might also try and bundle both of them together, maybe for about $400-$500.

I don't think that's going to be the only defining feature of next gen, though. Nintendo likes innovation, and I don't really think we can call that "innovative", so I think they'll come up with something else on top of that. What that could be, I have no idea though.

Edited on by Bolt_Strike

Bolt_Strike

Switch Friend Code: SW-5621-4055-5722 | 3DS Friend Code: 4725-8075-8961 | Nintendo Network ID: Bolt_Strike

Zizzy

8BitSamurai wrote:

Will this technology feature blast processing?

We can only hope...

Zizzy

3DS Friend Code: 4425-1585-6021 | Nintendo Network ID: Zizzy147

Dave24

Well, nothing new, it was actually expected. I mean, what other choice is there?

Dave24

unrandomsam

Could mean anything - ARM or x86 just the GPU.

“30fps Is Not a Good Artistic Decision, It's a Failure”
Freedom of the press is for those who happen to own one.

ScrollingLayers

Well I think it is a very welcome move, if it happens (AMD in the next handheld). The other major player in the mobile GPU space is Imagination Technologies with their PowerVR GPUs. They're in every single iPhone / iPad ever released. and PlayStation Vita, at least some of the Samsung Galaxy phones, and various other Android devices.

ImgTec / PowerVR went from very hard times in the 90s and early 2000s making graphics cards for PC (getting beaten by 3DFX in the market) and the graphics provider for a failed console (Sega Dreamcast) and some fairly successful arcade boards (NAOMI, NAOMI 2), to BOOM times in the last decade thanks to Intel, Apple and others licencing their PowerVR IPs.

AMD hasn't been nearly as strong in the mobile space so it would be awesome if AMD landed a deal with Nintendo.

There is also a little-known graphics company in Japan called DMP (Digital Media Professionals Inc) who would have been competing with AMD for the Nintendo deal. DMP provides a PICA200 - based GPU inside every version of the 3DS.

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