According to senior VP Tony Tamasi, ”I’m sure there was a negotiation that went on and we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay.”
”Having been through the original Xbox and PS3, we understand the economics of (console development) and the tradeoffs,” he added.
Tamasi went on to detail the economic issues of dealing with the PS4, stating that the company could easily power the PS4, but it just wasn’t worth it.
”We’re building a whole bunch of stuff and we had to look at console business as an opportunity cost. If we say, did a console, what other piece of our business would we put on hold to chase after that?”
“In the end, you only have so many engineers and so much capability, and if you’re going to go off and do chips for Sony or Microsoft, then that’s probably a chip that you’re not doing for some other portion of your business. And at least in the case of Sony and Nvidia, in terms of PS4, AMD has the business and Nvidia doesn’t. We’ll see how that plays out from a business perspective I guess. It’s clearly not a technology thing.”
AMD is reportedly also powering the next-gen Microsoft console as well.
