alt Hacker NewsAMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon
They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a couple hardware configurations, making it viable to take advantage of such hardware features
Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.
Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.