Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, talking about Zen.
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Why Nintendo isn’t likely to use AMD’s top Zen chip design — and why Microsoft will

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

Advanced Micro Devices revealed its schedule for rolling out Zen microprocessor chips today, and it disclosed a few tea leaves that are crucial for figuring out the moves that Nintendo and Microsoft will make in the video game console wars.

In short, AMD’s schedule for the release of its Zen high-end processor chips tells me that it will be coming out too early for Nintendo’s NX game machine, which the Japanese company has said will debut in March 2017. Microsoft, on the other hand, will debut its Project Scorpio game console in the holidays of 2017. That gives it the right timing and opportunity to make use of the Zen technology in a new Microsoft game console.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.