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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Adding a bit more context.

Nvidia got the bid for Switch when they were basically dumping those unwanted Tegra to Nintendo for an incredibly low price.

Xbox and Playstation dont earn AMD much profits at all. AMD had this Custom Processor segment to barely keep them surviving, people may forget AMD was only worth ~$3B market cap in 2016. They are now at ~$250B.

On the subject of software compatibility though, one thing I got it wrong was my prediction of having AAA titles on Xbox and PS would have helped AMD's market share on PC, given those titles are already optimised on Xbox and PS anyway. That didn't happen at all. And Nvidia continue to dominate.

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Sometimes a low margin business is all you need and have to keep the lights on, don't hemorrhage too much people and stay afloat until you get better winds.

Traditional MBA thinking sometimes is too short sighted. For example, PCs might not have been a Cash Cow for IBM, but the Thinkpad brand, the distributor relationships and the customer may had helped IBM more than the cash out selling this business to Lenovo. Maybe having a healthy bridge head with a popular brand of laptops could have helped IBM coming up with some innovative way of selling the overhyped Watson.

The same with AMD and videogames, it paid the bills, paid salaries and left a little profit on the table to be invested. Probably it helped them bridge from their hell days to what they are today.

There's a lot of intangibles and hidden symmetries, serendipitous opportunities that are frequently overlooked by our bean-counting master race overlords.

> Xbox and Playstation dont earn AMD much profits at all

It doesn't cost them much either. Lisa Su, in an interview that was posted to HN a few months ago, said it is a deliberate strategy to repackage IP AMD has already developed. They are willing to pull designs from the shelf and customize it to meet partners needs. Having a long tail of products adds up, and sets you up to get first dibs on higher margin partnerships in the future.

> Nvidia got the bid for Switch when they were basically dumping those unwanted Tegra to Nintendo for an incredibly low price.

This seems pretty well aligned with Gunpei Yokoi’s strategy of “Lateral Thinking [with] Withered Technology”. It worked out pretty well for Nintendo in the past (e.g., Gameboy) and seems to be working out with the Switch. Even though he has passed, his Wikipedia page alleges that this philosophy has been passed on to others at Nintendo.

> Withered technology

At the time of its release the Nintendo Switch’s CPU was only a single generation behind the latest offering by ARM; and its GPU was by far the most powerful mobile GPU available. It doesn’t hold true for Switch.

What happened is that mobile compute has advanced tremendously since 2017 and Switch is stuck on technology that was leading in early 2017.

While providing marvelous gaming experiences, faster polygons doesn't equate better games, and is specially an issue in latest gen PlayStation and XBox where many games with great graphics have lousy gameplay experience at high prices.

A few of the Playstation titles that made their way to PC do seem to have a little home field advantage on AMD chips, but not enough to sway people over to them.

> having AAA titles on Xbox and PS would have helped AMD's market share on PC, given those titles are already optimised on Xbox and PS anyway. That didn't happen at all. And Nvidia continue to dominate.

My impression is that console ports have insufficient popularity with PC gamers for them to alter their hardware purchasing habits for those games.

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