You gotta love earnings calls. Roughly 99% of the time, they are the most boring events on the face of the Earth. But there's that 1% – maybe a mere minute or two of a two-hour phone call – that all hell breaks lose.
This happened recently when AMD CEO Lisa Su told investors about "three design wins" in the Semi-Custom design business that point directly to at least one new console in 2016.
According to GamesIndustry.biz, Su told investors that the three new products fell into the console category, be released relatively soon and would integrate AMD's hardware.
With rumors circulating of one new system from each of the big three console manufacturers, Su's statement would make a lot of sense.
When pressured to talk in more detail about what those projects might be – whether it's the PS4.5, Nintendo NX or Microsoft's modular Xbox One – Su shrugged off the question.
"I don't believe that we've gone through any detail about what those wins are," Su said. "So I would prefer to let that come out as our customers are ready to launch."
Su said that she expects one of those projects to launch by the end of this year, with another to begin ramping up in 2017. She expects that the projects will net AMD around $1.5 billion in revenue over the lifetime of the machines, alongside the revenue she expects will continue to pour in from the current-gen consoles on store shelves today.
Price drops for current-gen
At a roundtable held at CES this year, Su told techradar that she expected price drops for the PS4 and Xbox One in the near future.
"Consoles tend to be very sensitive to price point, we see that as price comes down console [sales] volume goes up, and that will afford an opportunity to do that in this cycle," Su explained.
Clearly Su's answers aren't as rock-solid as a straight-up announcement of a new console, but the announcement of three new AMD-powered designs does add one more piece of evidence to a slowly growing case file pointing to new systems in 2016.
