The next Xbox and the PlayStation 5 may be already in the making, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Office of AMD Devinder Kumar seemed to suggest on Tuesday at a Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Technology Conference, without providing any specific details.
AMD’s processor technology powers the last-gen consoles you can already, including Sony’s PS4, Microsoft’s Xbox One and Nintendo’s Wii U. For the first two, AMD built custom APUs that contain both the processor and the graphics processing unit, The GPU in the Wii U is also an AMD chipset.
When asked about his views on the game console market and sales, Kumar revealed that the company’s clients may already be thinking of next-gen products, hinting that the next-generation Xbox or PlayStation 5 could be release much sooner than people expect.
“The life cycle of the products are probably going to be shorter,” Kumar said. “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. In this case it was AMD. And then you go ahead and co-develop the product with the funding dollars frankly, mostly coming from our customers. And then when you introduce the product, there is really no expenses from R&D standpoint, no sales and marketing dollars and whatever dollars you generate from a gross margin dollar standpoint, falls to the bottom-line and that’s what excites us.”
The AMD executive further said that AMD’s “very strong execution in the semi-custom” market has opened some important doors for AMD, helping it secure significant deals for future products, although it’s not clear whether they’re related to gaming or not. What Kumar did say was that the new product “wins” are in markets it’s already participating in, but also in new ones, and the company may make new announcements later this year.
“It’s not just, continuing just with the game console in the next generation, what do you do, but the aperture, I guess is increasing. And the engagement with the customers is very active across many different areas,” the exec said.
The Xbox One and the PS4 were launched eight and seven years after the Xbox 360 and the PS3 hit stores, respectively.
