After locking down both the Xbox One and PS4, it would appear that an AMD SoC ("System on a Chip") will also be powering Nintendo's next console. Nintendo has been hinting at new hardware for a while now, probably to appease their disgruntled gamers and shareholders over the Wii U's lackluster impact in the eighth-generation console war. Now, Shigeru Miyamoto has confirmed that Nintendo is working on what has to be a new gaming system, and AMD has confirmed that it's got another major design win. Are they one and the same thing? It would certainly seem that way.
At a recent conference, AMD's CFO Devinder Kumar said that the company had two major new design wins. When pushed on the details, he elaborated a little further, "I will say that one is x86 and the other is ARM, and at least one will be beyond gaming, right...they [the customers] are going to announce it and then...you will find out that it is AMD's APU that is being used in those products." When he talks about ARM, it's hard to say if he's talking about AMD's 8-core Cortex-A57 server Opteron chip (which is rather boring), or a Project Skybridge SoC with a custom-designed ARM CPU. Hopefully it's the latter, though that new ARM CPU isn't due until 2016.
So, this isn't quite confirmation that AMD is working on an SoC for Nintendo's next console, but given everything that I know about the industry, it seems highly likely. It would be interesting if Nintendo's next console was powered by an AMD ARM chip, but it's much more likely that it'll be an x86 SoC, just like the Xbox One and PS4. Thanks to TechRadar for the tip.
