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AMD chips will reportedly power Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 6 after the company won a bidding war against Intel, ensuring backward compatibility with PS4 and PS5 games.
According to Reuters, the upcoming Sony PlayStation 6 will reportedly be powered by AMD, similar to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
With the PlayStation 6 being Sony’s next console, various chip manufacturing companies, including Intel, AMD, and Broadcom, participated in the bidding to determine who would design the PlayStation 6 chip. Intel and AMD were two final bidders, as other companies like Broadcom ultimately bowed out of the competition. Reportedly, Intel lost the deal to AMD for two reasons.
The first reason was that Intel and Sony couldn’t agree on how both companies would share the profits. The second, and most likely the primary reason, was backward compatibility.
PlayStation chips are designed to ensure that users can play older games on newer hardware. Since both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 are powered by AMD chips, moving from AMD to Intel would have risked backward compatibility—something Sony and Intel engineers and executives discussed for months.
If Sony had used Intel chips to power the PlayStation 6, it would have become very costly and required significant engineering resources. As a result, this became one of the main reasons Intel could not secure the deal.
A deal between Sony and Intel would have been a major success for Intel. It would have kept Intel’s manufacturing capacity busy for at least five years and generated approximately $30 billion in revenue.
We are still years away from the release of the PlayStation 6, but machine learning will almost certainly play a major role in the upcoming Sony console. Additionally, with AMD securing the deal to design the PlayStation 6 chips, users can expect a mix of Zen 6 and RDNA 5 components in the upcoming console.
