Published in PC Hardware

AMD can meet console APU demand with ease

by on27 June 2013

Just a few million chips, we’ll churn them out in no time

AMD’s Jaguar based APUs have been the talk of the town for quite a while. Although they will end up in a wide range of products, from microservers to tablets, the most publicised design win was Sony’s and Microsoft’s decision to use custom Jaguar APUs in their new consoles.

Needless to say, such high-profile design wins might do wonders for AMD’s new chips and the company is keen to talk them up.

"It is a very, very proud moment," AMD’s Saeid Moshkelani told Games Industry. "They are very complex projects, very complex designs, and it doesn't happen overnight. It has been a journey of over two years in development to get to today."

Moshkelani stressed that AMD will have no trouble meeting demand for the custom chips, which comes as no surprise. TSMC’s 28nm process is mature and AMD has been using it to build GPUs for years. Besides, Jaguar has a relatively small die, making it cheap to build and ensuring good yields.

"From a manufacturing perspective, in a year we ship tens of millions of units," he replied. "So we have a very strong manufacturing base for our APUs and discrete graphics. We leverage the same manufacturing infrastructure to develop for game consoles. So the volumes were not something that actually raised an eyebrow for us, because we're already in high-volume manufacturing."

Although AMD’s custom APUs are very impressive, being true PC geeks we’re still waiting for the first laptops and nettops based on the new chips. We strongly feel that Jaguar will be AMD’s most competitive product in 2013 and beyond.

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