this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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It's a bit clickbaity to say Intel "lost" the PlayStation business when they didn't have it to begin with.
Sony has been using AMD CPUs for a couple generations of PlayStation now. Moving over to Intel would have screwed up backward-compatibility, adding a ton of work and striking a huge blow to efficiency if anything were going to be backward-compatible down the line and also thrown that monkey wrench into the works of any developers publishing for both generations during the switchover. The article touches on this a little bit.
Intel would have needed to present some magically miraculously sweet deal for Sony to even consider switching, and especially when Intel is doing generally crappy I can't see that being an easy thing for them to figure out.
x86/x64 code is pretty much 100% compatible between AMD and Intel. On the GPU side it's not that simple but Sony would've "just" had to port over their GNM(X) graphics APIs to Intel (Arc, presumably). Just like most PC games work completely fine and in the same way between Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs. But they have to do that anyway to some extent even with newer GPU architectures from AMD, because PS4's GCN isn't 1:1 compatible to PS5's RDNA2 on an architectural level, and the PS4's Jaguar CPU isn't even close to PS5's Zen 2.
Other than that, you're right. Sony wouldn't switch to Intel unless they got a way better chip and/or way better deal, and I don't think Intel was ready with a competitive GPU architecture back when the PS5's specifications were set in stone.
Thank you for correcting and clarifying!