Microsoft has confirmed its continued partnership with AMD on upcoming Xbox hardware development, focusing on multi-platform support and backward compatibility. This multi-year partnership should include consoles, handhelds, and more, with the aim being to bring the Xbox platform to all kinds of machines.
Sarah Bond, president of Xbox, confirmed the future of the brand will go beyond a single device or store. To accomplish this, Microsoft is maintaining its collaboration with AMD, with a goal to develop future hardware that will run next-gen games and older titles without issue. This co-engineered silicon will naturally be more powerful, improving visual fidelity, but will also leverage AI enhancements too.
Sticking with AMD affords Microsoft several benefits. Team Red is a proven player in the console space, able to scale its CPU and GPU architectures across different form factors. The only other manufacturer that could provide such a relationship is Intel, as the only other licenced manufacturer of x86 hardware. Team Blue did openly share hopes of becoming the next Xbox partner, but it seems the company’s Core Ultra and Arc products weren’t convincing enough. I’m sure discussions were had with Nvidia, á la Nintendo, but shifting entirely to Team Green would either require an architectural shift to ARM.
Based on the details shared thus far, the next Xbox console should at least feature RDNA 4 graphics. AMD has no other GPU architecture that supports AI upscaling and it also comes with welcome boosts to ray tracing performance. It’s difficult to say what CPU architecture Microsoft could opt for, but here’s hoping for some 3D V-Cache to push frame rates higher. As a co-engineering effort, though, this custom silicon could house exclusive features built for Xbox, akin to Sony’s Kraken hardware decompression for storage.
I’m curious to see how hardware will scale across devices. Microsoft’s ambitions to shift Xbox from a console to a multiplatform service has been years in the making, with ROG Xbox Ally Series handhelds marking the latest step. In an ideal world, this should make switching between devices much easier with seamless cross-play and cross-save functionality. However, we’ll need to see how this plays out in theory, particularly once multiple storefronts like Steam are in play.
