According to NVidia’s senior vice president of content and technology, Tony Tamasi, NVidia was approached by Sony to develop and produce PlayStation 4’s GPU, but they refused after deeming the deal worthless.
" 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," he said.
"Having been through the original Xbox and PS3, we understand the economics of the development and the trade-offs."
Of course developing PlayStation 4 GPU would’ve been profitable for any company, or else AMD wouldn’t have accepted it. In fact, NVidia was more concerned with the opportunities they’d miss if it directed its resources to that venue.
" If we say, did a console, what other piece of our business would we put on hold to chase after that?," explained Tamasi. "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."
PlayStation 4 was announced last month. It runs on AMD's 8-core 64-bit x86 Jaguar CPU and a customized Radeon GPU capable of churning out 1.84 TFLOPS.
Except for a couple of quarters at the beginning of 2010 and 2011, AMD has been accumulating losses for the last 5 years with $473 million loss accrued during Q4 2012 alone. Clearly, the company hopes that a lucrative long-term multi-million units deal such as next gen consoles’ GPU and CPU production would provide a safe and guaranteed revenue source for years to come.
