Here's your reminder how close AMD came to financial collapse and just how much we owe to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
It might be easy to forget the rocky road that led AMD to its current steadfast and comfortable position in the server and gaming CPU markets. Well, if we needed a reminder, the senior director of OEM consumer and gaming client business for AMD, Renato Fragale, has us covered. First spotted by X user Bogorad222 (via Wccftech), Fragale's LinkedIn profile states the team he managed oversaw product development for the PS4, which is viewed «as one of the most successful launches in AMD history helping AMD to avoid bankruptcy.»
A quick crash course on AMD history for those who have forgotten—or have perhaps blocked out—its tumultuous past. While some of the best gaming CPUs around today derive from AMD's Zen architecture, and while AMD's EPYC server CPU line-ups have been a massive success, between 2011-2017, there were the God-awful Bulldozer-based processors (Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, and Excavator line-ups).
These years were certainly far from zen for the red team. Stock prices stuck to the floor as processor architectures missed the mark for various reasons, such as the bizarre decision to optimise for parallelism while somehow making Bulldozer's single-threaded performance worse than many previous-gen Phenom processors (I still look back fondly on my pre-Bulldozer Phenom II X4 955, by the way, partially for this reason).
In fact, Bulldozer CPUs have such a sketchy history that AMD even agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit back in 2019 stemming from alleged false advertising over their core counts.
This, by the way, was after AMD had divested its own manufacturing arm, which became GlobalFoundries, a decision that was made to save itself from another possible moment of financial oblivion back in 2009. «On the brink» might not even cut it.
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