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It's possible they were restricted by agreements with Microsoft or Sony not to release anything before this year.


Those agreements would be >15 years old at this point, I doubt AMD would agree to sandbag their entire APU lineup going forward just to make the base model PS4 and Xbone look good, and I especially doubt that they would do that again with the PS5 and Xbox Series when they actually had money and room to negotiate. Likewise, it doesn't make sense as a restriction Microsoft or Sony would impose: the console business is one of convenience, not power. They aren't trying to beat PCs and they don't care if PCs are a better deal. They care if they can get you to buy a box that locks you into their DRM scheme.

Furthermore, during the chip shortages of the last few years, AMD was actually selling broken PS5 silicon for use as a normal Windows PC[0]. If there were restrictions on selling APUs above a certain performance level, then this PC wouldn't exist.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h08cMFwqRc


Historically PC OEMs cared about price more than graphics performance so that's what they got. If you look at mobile SoCs or the eDRAM-equipped SKUs Intel made for Apple you see more emphasis on memory & graphics performance similar to consoles.




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