AMD CEO ‘Thrilled’ with How Console Launches Went; ‘There’s Higher Demand Than We Thought’

AMD CEO Lisa Su participated in a remote Q&A with select journalists after her CES 2021 virtual keynote, where the executive unveiled the AMD Ryzen 5000 Series Mobility Processors.

An edited transcript of the interview was posted last Friday by VentureBeat. Among many other topics, the AMD CEO also went over the next-generation console launches by Sony and Microsoft, since those systems are powered by AMD technology. Overall, Lisa Su said the company is thrilled with how those releases went and added that there is higher demand for the console than they had anticipated.

We’re thrilled with how the console launches went. You’ve heard separately from Sony and Microsoft, their discussions about the size of the launches and the reception of the products. From our standpoint, if you think about it, with just the amount of new hardware that had to come into place — millions of units of both consoles, or all three consoles — that needed to ship, it came together very nicely.

As far as what we’ve learned, there is higher demand than we thought, and we’re trying to put more capacity in place for that. But we’re very happy with the launches, with the partnerships with both Sony and Microsoft. They have somewhat different strategies, but we’ve partnered very well with both of them. This is a big cycle. That says a lot about how much technology we’ve been able to integrate into the console form factor.

Indeed, both Sony and Microsoft announced to have had record launches for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, respectively. While supply was more limited than usual, the situation with next-gen console availability is a bit less dire than that of PC discrete graphics cards, where not only AMD and NVIDIA GPUs are practically unavailable – when they are, their prices are considerably jacked up, too. Unfortunately, both AMD and NVIDIA executives essentially confirmed availability won’t improve in the year’s first quarter.

The post AMD CEO ‘Thrilled’ with How Console Launches Went; ‘There’s Higher Demand Than We Thought’ by Alessio Palumbo appeared first on Wccftech.