It might be easy to forget the rocky road that led AMD to its steadfast position in the server and gaming CPU market, according to Renato Fragale, AMD's Senior Director of OEM Consumer and Gaming Client Business, We'll remind you of that: according to Fragale's LinkedIn profile, first discovered by X user Bogorad222 (via Wccftech), the team he manages oversees product development for the PS4, which he describes as "one of AMD's most successful launches in history. The PS4 is seen as "one of the most successful launches in AMD's history, helping AMD avoid bankruptcy.

For those who have forgotten or sealed AMD's tumultuous past, here is a brief history of AMD. While some of the best gaming CPUs today come from AMD's Zen architecture and AMD's EPYC server CPU lineup has been a huge success, between 2011 and 2017, the god-awful Bulldozer-based processors (Bulldozer, Piledriver, Steamroller, and Excavator lineups) existed.

These years have certainly been far from Zen for the Red Team, for a variety of reasons, including the bizarre decision to optimize for parallel processing while somehow making Bulldozer's single-threaded performance worse than many Phenom processors of previous generations The processor architecture was so off the mark that the stock price remained stuck to the floor (incidentally, I still look back fondly on the pre-Bulldozer Phenom II X4 955, in part because of this).

Indeed, Bulldozer CPUs have a sketchy history, so much so that AMD agreed to settle a class action lawsuit in 2019 arising from alleged false advertising about core counts.

This, by the way, was after AMD had spun off its own manufacturing division to become GlobalFoundries, a decision made in 2009 to save itself from a moment of financial oblivion. Perhaps "on the brink" is not the right word.

One might think that AMD's fate was saved by the glorious Dr. Lisa Su and her stable tenure as CEO, as is commonly believed. And there is certainly a lot of truth to this; without the Zen and Epyc lineup circa 2017, it is hard to imagine AMD surviving, let alone thriving and creating a rising tide that would pull up all boats.

Under Dr. Suh's leadership, the company has consistently delivered on its technical and architectural promises time and time again. And it is this consistency that has propelled AMD forward and made it appear as if things were always looking up. [But it hasn't.

Flagel's comments on his LinkedIn resume remind us that thanks to semi-custom units and a partnership with Sony in the development of the Jaguar APU (with GCN graphics) in the PS4, AMD's business life was also previously saved before Zen It is recalled that it was saved before the Another custom (higher clocked) Jaguar APU was used in the Xbox One, but the PS4 far outperformed the Xbox One, and Fragale's comments seem to point out that this kept AMD afloat until Su really turned things around for AMD after Zen

PS4.

This tumultuous history of buoyancy, in which the PS4 partnership likely played a major role, was commented on by Phil Park, an architect at AMD, who commented on Fragale's claim that the 2008 financial crisis caused AMD to "sell several IPs, like Adreno, to cash to raise cash," he noted. (Yes, that's the same Adreno now famous for the Snapdragon X.)

Right? What would we be without consoles?" probably sitting on fewer CPU cores, that's for sure.