Intel in the next gen of consoles?

They dont have any Pentium pro type tech to dust off this time. All of their technology is deficient compared to the competition.

 

Ponto Vecchio seems to be really impressing people and when it come to MCM designs I honestly think Intel is ahead of everyone else. You're right though, the Core series is probably reaching its limits in terms of design, they do have some tricks they can pull out from the proverbial bag though to shake things back up.

DG2 looks like it'll be at least somewhere around 3070/3080 level for the higher-end stuff, which isn't bad at all considering how difficult RTX 30 and RDNA 2 cards are to find right now. They could be a suitable 3rd option especially since they support the full DX12U suite. It may take a couple more generations though for Intel to compete with Nvidia and AMD's top-end GPUs in a same-generation context though.

Personally I'm hoping Intel can revamp their fabs to get them to at least 7nm within the next couple of years, and maybe 5nm by 2025. Try to get that back to their original timeline targets. It would be such a massive benefit for them and have them rely less on TSMC or Global Foundries, or Samsung considering Nvidia would be competing for wafers there. If by some freak luck they can make their internal fabs even more competitive, that gives a potential alternative for other companies and can help alleviate lack of product stock in the market.

Actually completely forgot to think of Google and Amazon in this lol. As you said, Google seem in with AMD now as well, but Amazon are relatively free. If Intel could net them in, that would be very interesting to see. But a lot of that also depends on how serious Amazon is with gaming.

Honestly there are aspects of Luna which are quite appealing in terms of the business model, but I do think they need an option for native gaming gamers can turn to. Microsoft has that benefit through the Xbox consoles, and I think if Amazon wanted to get really competitive they would need to consider some type of console or Steam machine-type box themselves. And if they did so, they'd get a better deal with Intel over Nvidia or AMD.

Uh, you should try looking at some of the leaked benchmarks for Clover Lake and DG2, and some of their stuff WRT Poncho Vecchio. Intel still has a lot to work with.

 

Any links to clover lake? I haven’t heard of that one. I also haven't seen any benchmark leaks for their GPU so a link for that would be nice as well. Poncho is irrelevant for the consumer market.

 

Look at upcoming chips. Remember people said the same about amd competition with intel during bulldozer that it was all over and that was it. intel has a lot of money and have plenty of design teams out here.

1) Ponto Vecchio could be really good but who knows. The real question will be if it can be better than what companies can already get because why leave for something that is almost as good or just as good and risk burning a bridge or having an issue down the road where the other supplier gets to cozy with a rival. Think if sony goes to intel it wont damper the close relationship they have had with AMD ? It will just let MS tighten their grip

2) DG2 we will again have to wait and see. I dunno I want to see how it performs and how drivers are for it. Intel has so many issues with current gpus they can't even run teams on i5s without issue on the surface line. Its a big issue right now and MS is pissed.

3) Its would be great to see.

4) Amazon and google are very serious or at least as serious as those arms of the company can be. Its just a lot of money and resources to enter gaming.

I think apple will do it like they are doing with everything and at that point i think it will be part of their undoing. Amazon will try because it makes sense with twitch just have twitch link to all their streaming games and push streamers who play any of the games on their streaming service. Same with Google , i think eventually stadia will just be sucked in by youtube and when you go to a video of a game that is on stadia you will get the option to play it

 

Pentium Pro was never actually in hibernation. It was Mobile Pentium III -> Pentium M -> Core Duo -> Core 2 Duo. Pentium 4 tech somewhat merged in with it.

They have all sorts of interesting things in the pipeline. I'm looking forward to seeing the big.little style chips that are coming.

 

Can Intel be competitive enough to complete with AMD in 5-6 years is not the speculation of the thread.

 

I agree with that. Intel doesn't need it, and console makers neither now that amd propose a decent cpu. Now, if AMD get tired of low margins for next gen, maybe Sony&MS can knock at Intel door, but I don't see that happening.

 

Oh it'd definitely sour their relationship with AMD if Sony went with Intel. TBH AMD and Microsoft already look quite cozy (not to say Sony & AMD don't); any increases in Xbox brand marketshare this gen as well as growth for Azure will just strengthen the AMD/Microsoft side of things even further. Since Microsoft are already working on ARM designs, they could do work on that with AMD for some possible Zen-ARM style CPU in the future which would likely doubtless be used in newer Surface devices and newer Xbox consoles.

Highlighting the corporate relationships with Sony/Microsoft and AMD though is a good way of illustrating why they'd likely stick with AMD for the future, and Nintendo has a good thing going with Nvidia so any new system seriously pushing Intel tech would have to come from a new player or one of the ones we've been discussing so far.

Oof, wasn't aware of this. Yeah, drivers are just as important (arguably more important) than the hardware itself; along with the APIs they help leveraging the potential of the silicon. Bad drivers in PC is a death knell no matter how good the tech is otherwise.

I don't know exactly what Google's plans are for Stadia outside of providing it as backend server tech for other companies, but they should be weary of Microsoft beating them to the punch on some of those innovative ideas they announced years ago, if Microsoft acquires Discord. It'll allow MS to do what Google promised they would do years ago, and I have a lot more faith in Microsoft pulling it off than Google at this point since Google have shown they're unwilling to seriously compete within gaming.

But as far as either of them desiring to build a console with Intel tech, they're probably the two best candidates, Amazon in particular. I still think cloud gaming will need some type of native console counterpart as an option for at least the next 10-12 years, you won't be able to go cloud-only for AAA console gaming. So a company like Amazon would need its own Xbox, so to speak. Apple, in a lot of ways it does actually seem like they're starting to rest on their laurels again; they have great profits but their percentage of marketshare keeps shrinking. Still though, they have strong brand appeal and have a niche with very loyal following, although it might just create a loop of them doubling-down on what's safe for satisfying that niche and reinforcing it, taking less of the type of chances they did in the early/mid-2000s'.

 

Apple arguably already have a console, they just dont sell any games on it, the apple tv. Apple is an expert of slowly improving their service offerings while offering them basically for nothing to their devoted user base until its good, then all the special offers/low prices dry up and hey presto they have a console! I fully expect the next apple tv (the physical device, to be clear) to have an m1 chip in it, and slowly get more game support on it, until its successor comes out as 'a credible game console' without the sort of support that xbox and playstation get, but 10-20 'big' (non mobile title port) games per year

I honestly dont think that anyone would be able to successfully launch a new console now, not if the three existing players remain in the game. The only exception to that in my mind however is tencent releasing a console focusing almost entirely on china and surrounding regions. The console market in the west is simply too saturated, and if Amazon or google launched a physical console I am certain that microsoft and sony would band together to make sure there is no way in hell that it was successful. We have already seen what happened when google launched stadia, microsoft and sony announed a partnership to 'explore cloud gaming opportunities and content creation' or something to that affect - something that no-one saw coming.

Rand from the xbox two podcast said that microsoft and sony were scared shitless about stadia and what google might do if they were serious, resulting in the cloud agreement between them. There is some circumstantial evidence to support this, as we got an imo, half baked, xcloud announcement that was seemingly rushed out as an answer to stadia. And the aforementioned cloud agreement, which I don't think anyone saw coming.

We have heard reports that stadia was paying upwards of $10 million per old game for some of the larger titles, that simply isn't sustainable to maintain until any new offering had a large enough market share to justify third parties making games for it without any compensation. Only the largest developers and publishers would be able to publish their games day and date on additional platforms, just because of the additional developer time needed for yet another rendering pipeline. MacOS gets hardly any support from game developers and it has infinitely more units in the wild than any new console offering would.

The only way a new console gets made and has a modicum of success imo is if amazon makes what amounts to a steam machine that runs windows, something that I doubt is possibly with the windows licensing agreement. I know google wont go this route because of their boneheaded decision to use linux

In hindsight, the only reason the og xbox and 360 took off to the degree that they did was because xbox replaced SEGA in the console market. You had a userbase of fans of the SEGA consoles who wanted to play SEGA games, and the only way to do it was on xbox. Unless sony or nintendo somehow becomes bankrupt in the next ten years and someone else steps in to fill their vacant slot there will be no new console entrants.

 

Apple would launch games on their TV devices and market it as though games on some kind of "console" device has never existed before until Apple did it.

 

Why create, market and sell a new console when you can create your own store on the PC? Companies have found more success imitating Steam than MS, Sony or Nintendo. You get a 30% cut without the need to invest billions of dollars into hardware that probably won't sell if you don't invest additional 100s of million into marketing. All without seeing profits until years into the future.

One of the limited ways you may see intel hardware in consoles is if AMD or Nvidia f@#$s up badly or intel suddenly invents a killer gpu that has features at performances that can't be easily replicated by competitors. The chances of that is slim to none.

The only other way is if Intel gets serious about becoming a competitor to TSMC and initially sells its services at a substantial loss to attract a platform owner like Nintendo.

 

While I think this is highly unlikely, there is a hypothetical situation where Intel is willing to do a low margin console part.

Today, Intel is behind what AMD is able to achieve, is large part due to the node disparity. However, Intel still sells massively more CPU dies than AMD does due to increased demand for silicon due to covid combined AMD having limited wafer supply due to competition with other companies for TSMC wafer starts. Thus both AMD and Intel are selling pretty much ever CPU they manufacture, but since Intel is only limited by their on Fabs, while AMD must compete with other companies, Intel can produce a much greater volume of CPUs.

If the demand were to lessen and TSMC wafer starts were to increase significantly and the relative performance between AMD and Intel CPUs remains relatively the same, then it's possible that a situation could arise where Intel is no longer able to sell every CPU they manufacture.

As Fabs are incredibly expensive to maintain, Intel could end up being in a position of accepting a lower margin contract if it meant that it could have Fabs continue manufacturing something rather than sitting idle and just draining money on a constant basis (like what happened to AMD when they could no longer compete with Intel after starting up a new Fab which led to them becoming Fabless).

Of course, Intel being Intel, those lower margin parts would only hold to the terms of the contract (whatever console generation used it) and so the console maker should be prepared for a future when Intel wouldn't accept lower margin parts if they projected that they could sell enough of their own product in the marketplace that they don't need a low margin volume customer in order to keep their Fabs operational.

In the current market situation, this all seems highly unlikely, but if AMD were continue to outpace Intel in gen on gen performance improvements in their CPUs AND they were able to significantly increase their allocation of wafer starts, then it's certainly possible that Intel could find itself in this position.

Regards,
SB

 

Almost correct.
At the time it dominated the market with a bad product, and the dominated it with a good one.
I still remember the scraping for the last tualatins to not be struck with a willamet.

Intel has almost no need to discount some product to gain market when it's already controlling it with barely legal practices.

 

Yeah, this part cannot be stated enough. It's almost as if the stars aligned for Microsoft to enter the market as Sega was leaving it (as a platform holder), in fact IIRC Sega wanted to work out a deal allowing Dreamcast BC on OG Xbox but Microsoft eventually turned that down. Perhaps one of the main reasons was because Microsoft were intent on using hardware from PC companies they already had relationships with at the time, like Intel and Nvidia, and any Dreamcast BC would've required specific hardware in the design like SH-4, or whatever new variant Hitachi had by 2000.

Given that as a factor, it was probably unrealistic in expecting Microsoft to essentially redesign Xbox around processor components completely outside of their comforts to ensure Dreamcast BC, and there's no way OG Xbox was capable enough to emulate DC in software. So if Sega really were pursuing that type of thing, I would have to question the logic behind it xD. Regardless, while Sega did split up their efforts somewhat that gen (Virtua Fighter on PS2, Sonic & Billy Hatcher on Gamecube), there's a lot of good reason why OG Xbox is often called Dreamcast's spiritual successor or Dreamcast 2; most of Sega's best games that time at least came to Xbox, quite a few were exclusives, and with games that got other versions on other platforms, the Xbox versions were the best.

Back more on topic though, I generally agree with that prognosis on any new competitors to the mainstream, major console gaming space. Again, there's maybe a chance smaller companies like exa-Arcadia turn to Intel solutions for whatever next-gen hardware they'd want to do, and perhaps develop console-like versions for a VERY specific client base and market segment having little crossover with the mainstream PS/Xbox/Nintendo stuff, but aside from that probably not a lot of chance. I did think about Tencent, and theoretically they could try a console for the Chinese and surrounding markets, but as a company they seem more interested in placing investments in other companies and letting those companies just do their thing. Seeing companies like Microsoft are pushing for console releases in the Chinese market is interesting, though; if those go over well, it could motivate Tencent into jumping into the fray.

I don't think Tencent would go with Intel tech though, they'd likely stick with a Chinese company like Hauwei, which would likely push them into an ARM & PowerVR or Qualcomm-based path.

 

fingers crossed they acquire SEGA and finally make all of SEGAs back catalog backwards compatible with the current consoles, honestly its the 3rd biggest thing I would be most excited about for if they did acquire SEGA, just behind all of Relics games coming to gamepass on day 1 and killer instinct possibly being made by AM2 (who do virtua fighter)

Right now Tencent is in a period of growth, at this point in time it doesn't make sense for them to meddle in any of their acquisitions, if they did it would potentially put other companies off from taking investment from Tencent, restricting, or at least retarding their growth potential. However there is a limit to their growth, a limit that I think they are rapidly approaching. Pretty soon regulators in the west will start to act against Tencent's acquisitions like the regulators in china are seemingly starting to do. Tencent has played very fast and loose for a long time and has been criticized by Chinese regulators for not properly notifying the government of some of their acquisitions and investments. Combined with the crackdown that china seems to be pursuing against the home grown tech giants and I cant see a world were Tencent isn't reigned in a bit. Combine this with growing anti-chinese sentiment, or at least skepticism in the west (not saying this is OK to be clear, but it is a thing that will affect them) I think Tencent's days of incredibly rapid growth are coming to an end. In combination with this, the game studio market seems to be in a bubble right now, in my opinion, what happens when the bubble bursts and Tencent's innumerable investments loose a good portion of their value? The capital that Tencent uses for its expansion dries up.

Bit of a long winded explanation leading to my point

If Tencent is restricted from buying any appreciable number of new studios there is no way to increase revenue besides increasing the revenue produced by their existing studios, which of course is possible, and I am sure will happen, but there is a limit to how much they can increase the revenue generated on a per title basis. The biggest single surefire way for Tencent to increase its revenue by a good margin is to start its own store. Immediately they don't have to fork over 30% of their revenue to a third party. Tencent starting its own store and locking their content to it in some way is inevitable at this point. Its will be the only way for them to increase revenue in the future. Once they are done growing inorganically tencent will start meddling

This isnt the first time that xbox was pushed in china, I have no idea how committed they were at the start of the xbox one gen but they did release the console in china. And iirc they even had an included set of office apps for the xbox so that the console could be sold as a 'computing device' and not a games console, which iirc were heavily restricted from sale at the time

I largely agree, however I do think there is a good chance that tencent would use intel / AMD for any potential console. Tencent are already partnered with AMD for their tencent cloud offering. As a counterpoint and to give support to your theory tencent has a partnership with Huawei for cloud gaming already. Whether that means that Huawei is making the actual chips or its just a tech partnership remains to be seen.


Link to the Tencent and Huawei partnership announcement
Tencent and Huawei Join for Cloud Gaming | COGconnected

 

Nintendo got hopelessly tied up to nvidia for anything but a hard transition without BC, the moment they got paid to not only provide the chip but also the vertical integration of the Switch's SDK.
Fortunately for them, the Switch is a major sales success so the surplus of money is probably enough to keep everyone happy no matter what.


As for Intel being in a next-gen console, I don't see why not.
At the moment they're also just another client of TSMC so it's not like they can say "our factories are too valuable to make low-margin SoCs for consoles".


They do need competitive CPU and GPU architectures, though. But by the time the next-gen consoles start their development (2023-2025?) ARM should already have very high performance cores derived of the X1 architecture, and Qualcomm will probably have the fruits of their Nuvia acquisition. Competition will hopefully be quite fierce at that point.

 

Fingers indeed crossed for that...well, maybe better I should say, if it trends that way to where an acquisition is going to happen, then I'd be cool with it. Not necessarily hoping or wishing for them to occur tbh but given companies like Microsoft are in a phase of wanting to make acquisitions, companies like SEGA fit their business strategy for console market expansion, particularly in Asian regions, and in terms of publisher consistency SEGA are arguably the most consistent in the industry going by aggregate review averages (I just wish they did more marketing for a lot of their games).

I was thinking, even if an acquisition doesn't happen, Microsoft could partner with SEGA the way they did with OG Xbox, and why not get AM2 & Atlus to make a new Fighters Megamix, only this time with a ton of Microsoft characters thrown in too? Sonic, Yakuza, Persona, DOOM, Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Pinata, Killer Instinct, Master Chief etc. characters all in one fighting game Megamix-style but modernized would be super awesome.

I had no idea Tencent actually went behind Chinese regulator's backs to make acquisitions without the CCP's knowledge, very interesting. I always thought Tencent's actions had the full support of the CCP and knowledge from the CCP beforehand, so that's really interesting to hear.

Given all of what you mentioned, it'd seem circumstances within the next five years (maybe even next 3 years) could see them taking the next step and producing a storefront to capitalize their investments on. And possibly pairing that with a Steambox-like device or at least some Apple TV-like device too. The more interesting question would be if they try distributing such outside of China, particularly in the West, and if so do they do it themselves or license it out to another company to handle distribution & marketing in those regions.

Lol they've already done this before eh? Something in me thinks they could make this work again in the future, but not necessarily by slapping office apps and services to an Xbox. I'm thinking more in terms of leveraging Xbox tech in a Surface-style device.

Also interesting; well, Tencent going with AMD doesn't do anything for Intel xD, but if we're talking more about a new player entering the mainstream big console market as a platform holder it'd seem Tencent has more of a means in laying groundwork to doing that than I originally realized.

Hmmm...could Nintendo have possibly gone with PowerVR, NXP etc. for designs or partnerships of a mobile-based device if they were particularly weary of Nvidia? Maybe they would've been worried about securing large enough volumes with those options, but there had to be other options out there. In hindsight they lucked out going with Nvidia, hopefully that good relationship perserveres.

Well there's apparently a thing of them opening up two new fab plants in the U.S for 7nm, which seems like a good move. It will allow them to rely less on TSMC, and give them potential clientele for 7nm wafer production depending on how good their capacities will be.

Yeah, definitely true. But my question is, WHO is going to go to Intel to set up a deal for such a console using their tech? Outside of smaller companies like say exa-Arcadia, Intellivision, Atari etc. who is there? Or maybe, Intel makes a play themselves? That would be interesting to see, but it'd have to be something closer to a Steambox-style business model I reckon, providing some consolized PC alternative.

 

I think what MS has learned over the last 20 years is that there is no real money in the console market. There's money in the games market, of course, but hardware is a necessarily evil at this point. As soon as the cloud is capable enough (which might be 20 years even), consoles as we know them are pretty much going to disappear IMO.

 

Instead or opening a new thread I will use this to ask.
Is an Intel based Steam Deck doable?
We do not know size nor power usage of ARC GPUs, but 2 clusters of E-Cores (8 Gracemont cores) and an ARC mini-gpu could be similar to Steam Deck APU in performance and power usage?

 

Yes.