The seventh generation of consoles was the longest ever and now seven months after the release of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, AMD's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Office Devinder Kumar has expressed enthusiasm for a shorter cycle this time round.
Both Sony and Microsoft used AMD chips for their consoles and this is what Kumar had to say about what's going on in Redmond and Tokyo:
“The life cycle of the products are probably going to be shorter. Our customers are already thinking about what comes next. These are long life cycle products and as you know in the semi-custom space, you start with — three years before you introduce a product, a decision is made to use a particular company.”
His comments, reported by BGR at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology Conference earlier this week, seem to reinforce claims by EA, Ubisoft, and Sony itself that the eighth console generation will be shorter.
Microsoft has suggested that the Xbox One will last "conservatively a decade" and while it may be supported for that long, it doesn't necessarily rule out a successor in the meantime.
It shouldn't be too surprising that Sony and Microsoft are looking to the future, Sony Worldwide Studio's president Shuhei Yoshida has previously said that as soon as the company launches a product a small group is tasked with planning what comes next. Serious preperations for the PS4 began in 2008, five years before the console actually launched.
The Xbox 360 launched just four years after the first Xbox while five years between systems has traditionally been the standard. How much of a gap do you think there should be until the next generation of consoles are released?
