Sony Playstation 4 chip helped AMD avoid bankruptcy — exec recounts how 'Jaguar' chips fueled company's historic turnaround

AMD’s Senior Director of Consumer and Gaming Client Business, Renato Fragale , recalls “helping AMD avoid bankruptcy” when he managed the team that developed the PlayStation 4 processor. The PS4 was launched by Sony in early 2013, and the success of the custom ‘Jaguar’ processor behind it (and in Microsoft’s Xbox One) was instrumental to AMD’s survival during a very difficult time for the company.

The headlining news nugget surfaced on social media when another long-standing AMD ‘lifer’ highlighted Fragale’s LinkedIn career experience statement. AMD’s Memory Systems / Interconnect Performance Architect, Phil Park, told his Twitter/X followers that he also remembers living through the difficult times at AMD spanning the late noughties to early 2010s. Both men have spent around 20 years of their careers at AMD.

In his Tweet/X thread, Park illuminates AMD's troubles during this era and discusses how the firm extricated itself from a dangerous financial situation.

After the 2008 financial crisis, AMD was in a difficult position and faced an energized Intel, which had recently come to market with products like Merom, Conroe, Woodcrest, and Nehalem. It takes time to turn around a chip design company like AMD, and the tricky market and strong competition meant that “We sold multiple IPs like Adreno to raise cash,” noted Park. “Most of us took temporary pay cuts.”

As mentioned in the intro, a lifeline for AMD’s finances arrived with the console contracts, which meant it earned cash by supplying the processors behind the PlayStation 4 (and Xbox One). Thanks to the success of this generation of Sony (and Microsoft) consoles, AMD earned an impressive yet steady stream of revenue. If you read AMD's financial news releases in the late 2010s, you will see that the Semi-Custom Business Unit began to deliver a steady financial stream from which AMD could invest in other forward-looking projects — like the development of the Zen CPU architecture that fueled the company's resurgence. AMD’s stock price touched $1.87 just ahead of the PS4 era, at the time of writing it is $163.90 but has been as high as $227.30 in the past year.

Park has some other interesting things to say about AMD recovering from the brink of bankruptcy. Another stroke of luck, the rise of netbooks, meant that AMD’s Bobcat APUs were a surprise hit with consumers, with around 50 million APUs sold. These AMD chips offered a winning mix of one or two CPU cores with integrated Radeon graphics in a low-power envelope (<18W), which was great for ultraportable affordable PCs.

Of course, the PS4 (and Xbox One) console processors, codenamed Jaguar , were built on the foundation that Bobcat provided but steered towards delivering modern gaming in a single APU. Jaguar delivered the advantage of more modern process technology, an octa-core CPU, greater frequencies, improved IPC, broader instruction set support, doubled bandwidth, and more.

PS4 and Xbox One consoles went on sale in 2013 and were phased out in the early 2020s as the next-gen machines started to prevail. The PS4 had an estimated lifetime sales of 117 million, and the Xbox One had around 58 million units, earning a lot for AMD as the processor supplier.

AMD also powers the newest generation of Sony and Microsoft consoles. However, in the interim, AMD recovered strongly from its 2010s doldrums by investing in new architectures like Zen CPUs (from 2017), new Radeon graphics architectures, successive APUs, other technologies, and strategic acquisitions.