AMD has shone a light on what their partnership with Xbox will entail – and they aren’t just clearing up the things Microsoft has been vague about, but about what AMD has been vague about too.
As we reported at the start of the week, Xbox announced that they signed a new contract with AMD. The two companies have a ‘multi-year partnership’ to make new dedicated chips in the future. At the time, the natural conclusion was that this was only for more Xbox consoles, the same deal AMD has for PlayStation. But as it turns out, that isn’t the case at all.
AMD CEO Lisa Su has come out in a new video to talk about their partnership. In her own words:
Moving forward, AMD will go beyond building custom chips for Xbox consoles to designing a full roadmap of gaming optimized chips – combining the power of Ryzen and Radeon for consoles, handhelds, PCs, and the cloud.
So as it turns out, AMD is going for broke with a bold new strategy. Future AMD computers are going to be designed specifically for video games. Furthermore, they’re doing it with Xbox, a move that brings them together to compete vs. Nvidia, Nintendo, Valve and others all in one fell swoop.
Another AMD executive, Jack Huynh, has shared even more hints about what they have planned. Huynh is SVP and GM of AMD’s Computing and Graphics, which means he’s even closer to the ground in the company’s gaming initiatives than Su is. Huynh said this on Twitter:
Big vision. Bold partnership. And we’re just getting started.
What if… the boundaries between player and experience disappeared?
It looks stunning…
It responds to you…
It goes with you…
And it remembers where you left off — no matter where you play.
In this next chapter with @Xbox, we’re not just pushing pixels. We’re reimagining what’s possible when silicon, software, and AI come together — unlocking new levels of fidelity, fluidity, and freedom.
All with one goal: Bringing players closer to the game
These are all bold and aspirational words, but what may surprise you is Huynh was talking like AMD was giving up on video games just a few months ago. In an interview with Tom’s Hardware, Huyn justified AMD’s decision to cede the flagship GPU market to Nvidia. This is after years of failing to oust Nintendo’s partner, who also happens to have dominated GPUs for what some people would say is way too long.
Huynh said this:
I’m looking at scale, and AMD is in a different place right now. We have this debate quite a bit at AMD, right? So the question I ask is, the PlayStation 5, do you think that’s hurting us? It’s $499. So, I ask, is it fun to go King of the Hill? Again, I’m looking for scale. Because when we get scale, then I bring developers with us.
So, my number one priority right now is to build scale, to get us to 40 to 50 percent of the market faster. Do I want to go after 10% of the TAM [Total Addressable Market] or 80%? I’m an 80% kind of guy because I don’t want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy. We want to build gaming systems for millions of users.
Yes, we will have great, great, great products. But we tried that strategy [King of the Hill] — it hasn’t really grown. ATI has tried this King of the Hill strategy, and the market share has kind of been…the market share. I want to build the best products at the right system price point. So, think about price point-wise; we’ll have leadership.
That all certainly sounded like defeatist talk, but the funny thing is, he also said this near the end of this interview:
Don’t worry. We will have a great strategy for the enthusiasts on the PC side, but we just haven’t disclosed it. We’ll be using chiplets, which doesn’t impact what I want to do on scale, but it still takes care of enthusiasts.
Huynh didn’t just randomly bring up chiplets to confuse people with jargon. This was a technological paradigm that split up larger silicon processors, enabling PCs to become smaller and more flexible. AMD enabled this innovation. You can learn more about this here.
This all certainly paints an interesting picture. After years of gaming PCs, especially PC handhelds, being relegated to higher income gamers, AMD and Xbox may be making changes to make PC gaming, and all of gaming, cheaper and more accessible to everyone. This may not be about bringing out the most powerful gaming devices, but flooding the market with a lot of cheaper and easy to use devices instead. That’s the kind of innovation that the industry has been looking for for decades. We definitely all can’t wait to learn about AMD and Xbox in the future.
