AMD Almost Went Bankrupt…but were saved by Sony and Microsoft?

AMD was in big trouble years ago - did Sony and Microsoft's decision to have AMD design the chips for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One save Team Red?

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[TeamCGS]

Yes and let's not forget the fact that Intel would pay $1 billion dollars to Dell to not use AMD products among numerous other insidious tactics.

[burnyrx]

Ah, yes... The dark ages of AM3 and FM2. Ryzen was such a game changer, an amazing comeback. Not to mention the insane improvements that Zen 2 and Zen 3 provided later down the line.

[chekote]

I signed up for delete me like a month ago. I’m still alive. Do not recommend

[zavirz]

Seeing how bad intel is screwing up low, I’m really thankful AMD survived till this day. Now if only it can get its shit together in the GPU side…

[MantaProx]

Thankyou to the console gamers who kept AMD afloat. Imagine how the cpu market would be now without AMD creating Zen Ryzen/Threadripper/Epyc processors.

[claudiobizama]

A video on the PowerPC architecture would be great. Hard to find something easy to understand about it.

[nerdy_dav]

Dr Lisa Su is a highly underrated piece of this puzzle.

She is by far an away the main reason AMD survived. Her leadership led to MS and Sony using AMD for their new consoles.

The fact that, as far as I can tell, you didn't mention her role is a bit of a cop out.

[ChrisLove]

Anybody else remember when AMD’s Athlon dual cores were kicking the shit out of pentiums and AMD seemingly was content with that, then Intel released the i3, i5 and i7’s and just ran away with the market? I do.

[JakeSDN]

This video missed a major reason. Nvidia held the Xbox games hostage. When Microsoft wanted to emulate their original Xbox games on the Xbox 360, Nvidia claimed that Microsoft would have to pay them a royalty for emulating the graphics of the original Xbox, so after arguing with Nvidia for a long time, Microsoft went with a process called software rendering. Apple’s problems with nvidia also stem from an Nvidia licensing “issue”.

[contiplays]

as a PC master race, I thank you, console peasants

[Hotshotk]

I actually wondered why it was AMD who handled console processors despite being behind Intel and Nvidia in CPUs and GPUs respectively, so it's great to have an answer to that question after all these years. Although the video title makes it sound like Sony and Microsoft were doing them some kind of favor, rather than making a sensible business decision that AMD was well-positioned to fulfill.

[thefalseshepherd]

It's a shame Motorola didn't stay in the game. Some of the 68xxx processors were great back in their day.

[brokenocci]

I like how the ending background is made by dots so small that if you watch the video in different qualities you can see different patterns

[dystopia-usa]

Intel has historically used notably unfair/shady business practices versus AMD (& others) that were not in the spirit of proper "free market capitalism" to put it as nicely as possible. So, glad to see Intel suffering some these days with their faulty CPU's, etc. My 2015 PC build was the last time I used an Intel CPU.

[michaelrose]

The Wii was the most popular console at the time 1:45

[cmrs]

Crazy to me that if I had had some money at the time when amd's share price was under two bucks and I actually knew about it and wanted to spend money on it. I would have actually made out pretty decent amount of money

[charlesball]

AMD was saved by the release of the AMD Thunderbird in the year 2000.

[ChrisSmith-tcdf]

Let’s not forget the 2009/11/11 Settlement Agreement between AMD and Intel:

As consideration for this settlement agreement alone, Intel agrees to pay and shall pay to AMD the total sum of One Billion, Two Hundred and Fifty Million Dollars ($1, 250, 000, 000) 🤙, in U.S. currency, within thirty (30) days of the Effective Date.

[RILDIGITAL]

It's interesting to see how console gaming played such a significant role in their survival and eventual success.

[Kaptime]

I pray one day AMD can have a Zen moment with a chiplet GPU or something.