AMD has announced future plans to expand its roster of gaming-centric chip designs beyond the Xbox and PlayStation ecosystems. The company announced on YouTube that it is creating a full roadmap of gaming-optimized chips, powered by Ryzen and Radeon, that are tailor-made for consoles, handhelds, PCs, and the cloud. How this differs from its current lineup remains to be seen.
This news comes days after Microsoft announced its extended partnership with AMD to build its next-generation Xbox console (codenamed Xbox Next) and future Xbox handheld gaming PCs. AMD's announcement is somewhat vague, but it reveals the company wants to expand its existing portfolio of gaming chips, such as the Z1 and Z2 series, to build a whole ecosystem of gaming-focused chips tailor-made for all platforms in the gaming industry.
Lisa Su also confirmed that these upcoming chips will be backward compatible with older hardware and cross-compatible with various platforms (suggesting all of these chips will be x86-based). AI-gaming technologies will also be supported, including AI-based upscaling "...that includes new foundational models to accelerate the state of the art in rendering."
AMD has yet to release this future roadmap, but undoubtedly, these new chips will include successors to the Z2 series that are currently on the market for handheld gaming PCs, as well as a variety of other chips to suit other markets. We can expect most (if not all) of these future chips to be APU-based, since all of AMD's previous custom chip designs (for gaming systems) have been APUs, ranging from the custom AMD silicon in the Xbox 360 all the way to the Steam Deck's Van Gogh APU and custom silicon in the Xbox Series X, Series S and PS5/Pro consoles.
Providing gaming-focused APUs will give more manufacturers and potentially DIYers (on the PC side) new ways to build future gaming systems, but it remains to be seen how the new roadmap will be aligned.
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