Nvidia Declines Sony's PlayStation 4 Offer Over Low Bid

In an interview with GameSpot, Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at Nvidia, said his company decided that developing and supplying graphics chips for the PlayStation 4 wasn't worth the money Sony was offering Nvidia. "I'm sure there was a negotiation that went on, and we came to the conclusion that we didn't want to do the business at the price [Sony] was willing to pay."

Specifically, Tamasi told GameStop that Nvidia wasn't willing to put other business on hold to "chase after" customized graphics technology for Sony.

[Related: Nvidia Boosts Smartphone Play With Tegra 4i With Built-In LTE ]

Nvidia, which has been concentrating on the mobile device market with its Tegra family of processors, had previously worked with Sony on the PlayStation 3 to develop the system's RSX "Reality Synthesizer" GPU technology. However, Sony tapped Nvidia rival AMD to supply the game console with both customized Radeon GPU technology as well as custom-designed accelerated processing unit (APU) jointly developed by Sony.

While the previous PlayStation ran on a proprietary CPU design dubbed the Cell processor, Sony switched to an x86 design for the PlayStation 4, which theoretically will make both the hardware and software design for the system less costly and time-consuming. The PlayStation 4 will run an x86-based APU with eight 64-bit cores plus the next-generation Radeon graphics, which AMD says will deliver nearly 2 teraflops per second.

While Nvidia has made its fortune in the graphics chip business, the company has been expanding beyond GPUs with its mobility play. The company recently unveiled its fourth-generation mobile processor, the Tegra 4, and also introduced a mobile gaming hardware device called Project Shield, which will run Android.

PUBLISHED MARCH 14, 2013