Xbox Boss Phil Spencer Talks About AMD Partnership For “Future Platforms” At CES 2019

During AMD’s CES 2019 keynote, Xbox boss Phil Spencer went on stage to talk about the continued partnership between the two companies. Most notable is his mention of “future platforms” which teases AMD’s technology will be used in the CPU for Microsoft’s next console, much like Xbox One.

“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. “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.”

In December 2018, Microsoft insider Brad Sams reported that the next Xbox would release in 2020 and use AMD’s next-generation GPU and a Zen 2 processor. Spencer’s speech at CES is the closest we’ve come to a confirmation that any of that information is true.

Spencer has been dropping hints about the next Xbox since E3 2018, which many have taken as a sign that an announcement is coming soon. The Xbox boss has already confirmed that multiple consoles are in development, but there hasn’t been an announcement detailing whether they’re all for next-generation or if one is a final upgrade for Xbox One–like the One S and One X consoles. Even when they weren’t expressly about new consoles, Xbox made moves in 2018 that hinted towards a promising future for the next generation, such as acquiring seven game developers.

Other announcements for AMD’s new technology came out during the CES keynote, which can be found in the coverage done by GameSpot’s sister site CNET. Most notable are AMD’s new Radeon VII, which is the world’s first 7nm gaming GPU and company’s most powerful one to date, and third generation Ryzen CPU, which can outperform an Intel i9-9900K on a Cinebench multicore test.

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