AMD engineer tells the tale of when the PlayStation 4 saved the chipmaker from bankruptcy

[Daniel Sims]

Recap: Those familiar with AMD's history likely know that the years from the middle 2000s to the mid-2010s were the company's darkest, but a few recent employee comments have revealed just how close the company came to bankruptcy. Red Team enjoys a stronger market position than ever, partially thanks to PlayStation.

A LinkedIn resume footnote has brought renewed attention to AMD's dark days during and after 2008 financial crisis. According to the CV and comments from an engineer, sales of consoles based on the company's hardware were a crucial lifeline.

The online resume of Rentaro Fragale, AMD's senior director of Consumer & Gaming Client Business, states that the PlayStation 4's 2013 launch was one of the most successful in the company's history, helping AMD escape possible bankruptcy. Engineer Phil Park responded to a clip of the resume on Twitter, confirming that those years were highly precarious for the company.

I lived through this and this is, AFAIK, true.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis put us in an incredibly bad position, especially after Intel's recovery with Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest and Nehalem. We sold multiple IPs like Adreno to raise cash. Most of us took temporary pay cuts. https://t.co/AkuvpkWJxD

– Phil Park (@philparkbot) July 4, 2024

Everyone suffered from the 2008 recession, but rival Intel recovered relatively quickly through the success of IPs like Merom, Conroe, Woodcrest, and Nehalem. Meanwhile, the economic downturn only compounded AMD's trouble.

Team Red was struggling to respond to Intel's Core series CPUs. It had paid far too much money for its ATI acquisition. To make matters worse, Intel paid OEMs billions to keep AMD chips out of pre-built PCs. The struggling chipmaker raised cash by selling off IPs and divisions.

Imageon was one example, which eventually became Adreno – the core of the graphics hardware in Qualcomm's Snapdragon series. Team Red also spun off its foundries into "Global Foundries." Park said most of those he worked with suffered temporary pay cuts.

Also Read: The Rise, Fall and Renaissance of AMD

The first sign of recovery was Bobcat, an architecture designed for netbooks and other low-power systems. Furthermore, Bobcat nearly failed to launch, but it performed better than expected. Imagining a future where it hadn't is difficult.

After that, Sony and Microsoft chose AMD's Jaguar to power the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. As of 2022, Sony had sold around 117 million PS4s, likely making Jaguar one of AMD's most widespread chips. Park credits this success with keeping the company afloat until Zen brought it back to competitiveness with Intel. He also teased other interesting stories from the period that he can't expose without permission from chief PS4 designer Mark Cerny.

Red Team's current Zen and RDNA architectures are leaders in the industry, powering the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series machines. Later this year and next year, AMD plans to introduce RDNA 4, Zen 5, and RDNA 5.

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AMD engineer tells the tale of when the PlayStation 4 saved the chipmaker from bankruptcy

 

[redhat]

"Intel paid OEMs billions to keep AMD chips out of pre-built PCs"
To be honest, I still feel somebody is still paying. Just look at laptop's cpu variety, Intel has twice if not triple laptop selection vs AMD.

 

[Dimitriid]

"Intel paid OEMs billions to keep AMD chips out of pre-built PCs"
To be honest, I still feel somebody is still paying. Just look at laptop's cpu variety, Intel has twice if not triple laptop selection vs AMD.

Not still paying, but still paying up back from those days: It's not completely unfeasible that several mayor companies signed up with the big 3 (Dell, Lenovo/IBM and HP) for a contract that spawned 5-10 years and was renewed right around the initial Ryzen launch which wasn't spectacular enough to get out of these long-standing contracts so all 3 still have several highly unfair discount still apply to whatever they build, so they build intel.

I know I'll invite the libertarian side of this accursed place by saying this but the fact that all these years we're all stuck with arguably inferior laptops or just cannot choose AMD for whatever reason is a great reason to be 10x more aggressive in regulating companies like intel or Microsoft: It might be too late to undo the damage they did today but we can at least stop this from ever happening again and be wondering how the market got so inherently broken 15+ year after someone was allowed to just preemptively avoid competition without actually having merits spawning that long into the future.

 

[Jme Kerul]

"Intel paid OEMs billions to keep AMD chips out of pre-built PCs"
To be honest, I still feel somebody is still paying. Just look at laptop's cpu variety, Intel has twice if not triple laptop selection vs AMD.

Remember, Intel marketing budget somewhere around 2 billions is as big as AMD's entire budget.
Ot it was but now AMD probably is a little bit bigger.

 

[gamerk2]

As I noted at the time: Had Zen failed, AMD was going to go bankrupt, given its outstanding debt was more then the company's total valuation at the time. Zen was literally AMDs last shot, and they nailed it.

 

[Endymio]

It's not completely unfeasible that several mayor companies signed up with the big 3 (Dell, Lenovo/IBM and HP) for a contract that spawned 5-10 years and was renewed right around the initial Ryzen launch

Translation: "I haven't a shred of evidence, but I'll go with my emotions anyway. Who needs logic?"

...the fact that all these years we're all stuck with arguably inferior laptops or just cannot choose AMD for whatever reason or whatever reason is a great reason to be 10x more aggressive in regulating companies.

Or we could just stick with that whole "freedom" thing that's worked out well so far. The more heavily-regulated a market is, the less innovation and progress it sees. And there hasn't been a period in the last 30 years that you couldn't purchase an AMD laptop or desktop. I realize you're seething with tooth-chattering rage over the fact that, even when AMD does have clearly superior products, many people still prefer to buy Intel. But that's the power of marketing.

 

[BobDolesGhost]

"Intel paid OEMs billions to keep AMD chips out of pre-built PCs" To be honest, I still feel somebody is still paying. Just look at laptop's cpu variety, Intel has twice if not triple laptop selection vs AMD.

From past reading, I've read that the reason AMD is not in many laptops is that AMD's support to 3rd party laptop integrators is a poor shadow of Intel's support. Its simply more difficult to get an AMD design working well. I think I read this maybe 3 years ago, so its not impossible that this has changed today

 

[TheBigT42]

As I noted at the time: Had Zen failed, AMD was going to go bankrupt, given its outstanding debt was more then the company's total valuation at the time. Zen was literally AMDs last shot, and they nailed it.

Yep...They needed something great to recover from the dumpster fire CPU Bulldozer.
Until my Zen3 the last AMD CPU I had was the Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz. I had a 386 40mhz and a 486 DX4 120mhz before that.

 

[gamerk2]

Yep...They needed something great to recover from the dumpster fire CPU Bulldozer.
Until my Zen3 the last AMD CPU I had was the Athlon Thunderbird 1Ghz. I had a 386 40mhz and a 486 DX4 120mhz before that.

I remember back on Toms all the debates that we had (including AMDs own shill); I was always questionable on the base architecture and the promise that high clocks plus more cores would offset the clear architectural problems.

Then the initial cache access times leaked, and even I said "these must be fake; there's no way they're *that* bad". They were, in fact, that bad, and the performance was disappointing from day 1. Barely better the Penryn, slower then Nahalem, and massively inferior to Sandy.

Ahh, I miss those good old days arguing "Core 2 Quads aren't "true" quad cores as they are just two Core 2's stapled together". Good times.

 

[Vulcanproject]

PS4 and Xbox One for that matter were definitely somewhat budget machines, the console generation after the 2008 crash. In many ways that worked for AMD since Microsoft and Sony knew they couldn't be creating exotic or expensive hardware like they had in generations past.

Both had been somewhat burned by Nvidia licensed GPUs costing them a fortune. First the OG Xbox, then Sony with the PS3. They had to be trimmed down with straightforward x86 architecture and SoC designs to hit $399 price points without incurring big losses per unit, as had been accepted generations prior. AMD were the only company that could put it all on one chip and accept the slim margins.

 

[gamerk2]

Oh, both consoles were absolutely budget. For all the flack the Cell gets, it was about twice as fast (at maximum theoretical throughput) then the PS4s CPU. Thing was a *beast* when fed properly.

 

[HardReset]

Oh, both consoles were absolutely budget. For all the flack the Cell gets, it was about twice as fast (at maximum theoretical throughput) then the PS4s CPU. Thing was a *beast* when fed properly.

We have seen many CPU architectures "fast if used correctly" that are basically vanished. Like Transmeta, Itanium, Cell, perhaps some unannounced ones...

The all vanished because of that. If compiler won't do most work, it means most software will be trash.

 

[gamerk2]

We have seen many CPU architectures "fast if used correctly" that are basically vanished. Like Transmeta, Itanium, Cell, perhaps some unannounced ones...

The all vanished because of that. If compiler won't do most work, it means most software will be trash.

Remember back in the PS3/360 days most consoles were still using *very* low-level libraries and coding; not like today where you just do everything in Unreal/Unity and call it a day.

 

[HardReset]

Remember back in the PS3/360 days most consoles were still using *very* low-level libraries and coding; not like today where you just do everything in Unreal/Unity and call it a day.

Very low level coding is doing assembly. I doubt they were doing that.

Instead they were most probably using C or C++. Compiler should then make code that runs well on CPU. If it fails to do that, execution units are not getting enough data and CPU is not running on speed it potentially could. They could of course optimize code for compiler but that was and still is very hard and time consuming to do. Something Most programmers are not going to do.

 

[gamerk2]

Very low level coding is doing assembly. I doubt they were doing that.

Instead they were most probably using C or C++. Compiler should then make code that runs well on CPU. If it fails to do that, execution units are not getting enough data and CPU is not running on speed it potentially could. They could of course optimize code for compiler but that was and still is very hard and time consuming to do. Something Most programmers are not going to do.

The problem with the PS3s architecture is there were HW bottlenecks that would stall the CPU if not properly managed, and the only way to keep the CPU fed was to manually manage which resources were going to each Cell core. Just letting the compiler decide how to allocate CPU resources would *kill* you in PS3 development.

 

[HardReset]

The problem with the PS3s architecture is there were HW bottlenecks that would stall the CPU if not properly managed, and the only way to keep the CPU fed was to manually manage which resources were going to each Cell core. Just letting the compiler decide how to allocate CPU resources would *kill* you in PS3 development.

Exactly. Because there were no compiler that would do that resource management, Cell CPU goes into "IF there was a compiler" -category. No compiler -> most programmers were not be able or had resources to do hard work -> most software for Cell CPU basically sucked -> CPU choice for next CPU will be easier for programmers.

Funny that Sony initially thought Cell would also handle graphics so no GPU is needed. At least they figured out quickly that won't work.