Nintendo may have announced a partnership with Nvidia for their consoles going forward, but it looks like Microsoft intends to stick with rivals AMD for the foreseeable future. Taking the stage at AMD’s CES 2019 keynote, Xbox boss Phil Spencer confirmed that future Xbox consoles will continue to use AMD chips, praising the company’s culture, and AMD’s history of innovation.
“As a company, we look at the opportunity in gaming and one of the things I want to say is when we think who our partners are, we think about great companies that do great work, but also do it in the right way,” Spencer said. “[AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is] somebody that I respected a ton in this industry and I’ve seen the way [she has] led AMD, and I think having a partner like AMD that works so collaboratively with us on our future technology, but also as a cultural level I think fits so well, it’s awesome to have you as a partner.
“As we look forward to future platforms that we’re building and work that we’re doing, the partnership and the innovations that we’ve seen in the past have led to what we’ve been able to do today, I think they’re going to be critically important to our future endeavors. I’m really looking forward to showing those to people more in the future.”
Given the wonderful hardware that Microsoft and Sony have both been able to put out thanks to their collaborations with AMD—the original PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One X are gorgeous, well balanced bits of silicon—this is good news all around. It also implies that backward compatibility for the next Xbox will be easier than if Microsoft had switched chipset families entirely (as they did between the Xbox 360 and Xbox One).
As of right now, we don’t know much about the upcoming Xbox, but we do know that it seems like there will be more than one new console introduced by Microsoft in the coming months. Hopefully we will learn more about them all soon enough.