Today, AMD is in very good health, the technology is highly valued in the markets in which it is present and is able to stand up, with great dignity, to the strong competitors it faces in them. In addition, its policies have in certain aspects managed to gain sympathy, if not clear preference, from some user communities, as is the case for example in the free software community for its policies regarding its graphics adapter software.

We must remember that we are talking about a great veteran of the technology sector, founded no less than in 1969 (actually they’ll be celebrating their 45th birthday this year in 2024), and that they already started making their own processors in the mid-seventies…with an Intel 8080 clone, yes. In any case, the blood would not end up in the river, as the two technology companies signed an agreement in 1982 that gave AMD a license to manufacture chips with Intel technology. Later things got complicated and they ended up in court… but that’s another story.

Be that as it may, AMD has gone through periods of great popularity, compared to others in which its situation was much more threatened, for a variety of reasons. And now, more than 10 years ago, one of these critical moments occurred, when AMD was on the brink and many market analysts were betting that even in the best case, the company would not reach the end of the crisis alive. decade, even though the company had just gone through a major restructuring (with many layoffs). All seemed lost… but then along came Sony.

PlayStation 4 helped AMD avoid bankruptcy pic.twitter.com/NZJqPQGCHr

— Timur222 (@bogorad222) July 4, 2024

After the first three successful generations of the PlayStation, Sony faced (or so it thought) an increasingly powerful rival, the Xbox, which made the situation quite complicated for it in the confrontation between the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. The generation that was to come, approached AMD to have the technology company design and manufacture a custom chipa set of CPUs and GPUs that would be responsible for the intelligence of the PlayStation 4. And as we read in Wccftech, AMD created a team of 15 people led by Renato Fragale, currently a senior manager of the company, to design the said chip.

What followed is well known. The PlayStation 4 was a huge commercial successwith over 90 million units sold and Fragale himself admits on his LinkedIn account that It was this success that saved AMD from bankruptcy, because the restructuring in 2011 was not enough to clean up the company’s situation. It’s true, yes, Microsoft’s mistakes with the Xbox One were a big help for Sony, but we shouldn’t think that it worked in AMD’s favor either, since Microsoft’s integrated console was also designed and manufactured.

Can you imagine how bad things would go if Sony didn’t consider them when making PlayStation 4 integrated devices? What do you think the current state of the processor and graphics card market would be in that case?