X
Business

Xbox One deal worth more than $3 billion to AMD, claims former VP

AMD secured a deal to provide Microsoft with the silicon to power its new Xbox One console, and a former AMD VP claims that the deal is worth in excess of $3 billion.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Whether you end up buying a Sony PS4, a Nintendo Wii U, or a Microsoft Xbox One, they all represent money in the bank for AMD since all three consoles are powered by AMD-branded silicon. And now, thanks to a comment made by a former AMD employee, we know just how much securing the new Xbox was worth to AMD.

Bob Feldstein, a former VP at AMD, and currently VP of technology licensing at Nvidia, posted on his LinkedIn page that the AMD/Microsoft deal was worth in excess of $3 billion.

2013-05-2217-24-34-620x335.jpg
(Source: Microsoft)

"My involvement was focused on business management and supply agreement negotiations," his entry reads.

"This required the coordination of multiple functional teams within AMD, as well as regular customer meetings with leadership teams responsible for handling the challenges of complex, multi-year deals. This project is valued at $3+B."

The APU in the Xbox One is based on the Jaguar architecture, which is a follow-on to the Bobcat architecture used to build the Ontario, Zacate and Hondo APUs. The CPU is likely to be clocked somewhere in the region of 1.5 to 2.0GHz, while the graphics core should be good to around 1GHz.

The Xbox One is powered not by one but two operating systems running on a custom version of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor. There's the Xbox OS for gaming, and a Windows kernel for apps. The multiple cores gives the new console enough power to handle the multiple operating systems, and the hardware can switch between the two operating systems and devote APU cores as required.

This is an interesting approach, and gives the Xbox One unprecedented flexibility in terms of what it can do.

AMD's stock has jumped nearly 2.5 percent as it continues to reap the benefits from pivotal place in each of the next generation of video game consoles.

Editorial standards