Xbox and AMD sign a new multi-year partnership for next-gen gaming

Xbox has announced a new “multi-year strategic partnership” with AMD, securing the chipmaker to develop the processors for the next-generation of Xbox devices, which will include consoles, PC, handheld and cloud gaming.

President of Xbox Sarah Bond announces the partnership and confirms that AMD will co-engineer silicon with Microsoft for a wide portfolio of devices, which does include the next-generation Xbox console.

This confirms that Microsoft is sticking around in the console-making business and will release a successor to the Xbox Series X|S to go up against the inevitable PlayStation 6.

Bond promises that this will enable “deeper visual quality, immersive gameplay, and AI-powered experiences”, as well as noting that the platforms and the ecosystems will “not tied to a single store or device, and fully compatible with your existing Xbox game library.”

This is largely a confirmation of the direction that Microsoft is heading in, following on from the announcements at Summer Game Fest. There Microsoft revealed the ROG Ally X, a new Windows PC handheld developed by Asus and with Xbox branding and integration. They also doubled down on Xbox Play Anywhere, a scheme in which you can purchase a game from Microsoft and play it across both Xbox consoles and Windows PC… except that they now brand this as Xbox PC to unify the approach.

Sticking with AMD makes an awful lot of sense. AMD’s CPUs are market leading on PC at the moment and their GPUs have made great strides with the most recent generation to catch up with Nvidia in areas like neural upscaling and ray tracing. Their work is continuing with Project Redstone for the Radeon 9000 series, though Microsoft is obviously privvy to behind-the-scenes work being done for future generations as well.

Similar to Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft and AMD will co-develop future chipsets for Xbox consoles and devices – just as AMD and Sony co-develop the chips for PlayStation consoles in the last two generations. What this generally looks like is AMD providing the technology and Microsoft fine-tuning the configuration, potentially pushing to include certain key features that could be coming from future CPU and GPU technology, rolling it back into the fixed platform of a console.

So, Microsoft’s sticking around with a more traditional console, it sounds like, and it will be backward compatible. Good news!

Source: Microsoft