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

AMD Jaguar APU
AMD Jaguar APU (Image credit: Fritzchens Fritz)

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.

(Image credit: Future)

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.

Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

  • d0x360
    Good times and not just because I bought a bunch of AMD stock when it was sub $2.

    Nobody back then would believe how AMD is doing now if you told them about Zen, mi300, or how they are eating away Intel's market share in data center, desktop and now mobile is about to kick off too.

    Amazing what some money for r&d combined with good leadership can do
    Reply
  • usertests
    RIP in peace Jaguar E-cores, you were too slow for this cruel world.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    usertests said:
    RIP in peace Jaguar E-cores, you were too slow for this cruel world.
    Yes, I was going to point out that these were AMD's E-cores!

    They were small enough and low-power enough that you could fit 8 of them + a decent sized GPU on a single die, and that's what counted. After the PS3 and XBox 360, I think game devs were comfortable enough with multithreading that it was probably an acceptable tradeoff to get more slower cores vs. a few faster ones.

    Remember, this was right in the middle of Intel's quad-core era. So, to have 8 slower cores wasn't such a bad tradeoff, even though aggregate throughput was still lower. If comparing against a mainstream Intel i7 (at least, from Nehalem to Kaby Lake ), you had 8 threads either way, thanks to the i7's hyperthreading.

    BTW, I think AMD's strategy of going all-in on Zen proved wise. If they had continued developing their E-cores, perhaps it would've unlocked some lower-cost markets for them, but the Zen series cores have generally been smaller than their Intel counterparts, which has helped AMD in partially addressing lower market tiers with it. And now they have the C-series.
    Reply
  • jeremyj_83
    bit_user said:
    Yes, I was going to point out that these were AMD's E-cores!

    They were small enough and low-power enough that you could fit 8 of them + a decent sized GPU on a single die, and that's what counted. After the PS3 and XBox 360, I think game devs were comfortable enough with multithreading that it was probably an acceptable tradeoff to get more slower cores vs. a few faster ones.

    Remember, this was right in the middle of Intel's quad-core era. So, to have 8 slower cores wasn't such a bad tradeoff, even though aggregate throughput was still lower. If comparing against a mainstream Intel i7 (at least, from Nehalem to Kaby Lake ), you had 8 threads either way, thanks to the i7's hyperthreading.

    BTW, I think AMD's strategy of going all-in on Zen proved wise. If they had continued developing their E-cores, perhaps it would've unlocked some lower-cost markets for them, but the Zen series cores have generally been smaller than their Intel counterparts, which has helped AMD in partially addressing lower market tiers with it. And now they have the C-series.
    The AMD E-cores were vastly better than Intel's Atom cores at the time as well.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    jeremyj_83 said:
    The AMD E-cores were vastly better than Intel's Atom cores at the time as well.
    Heh, the first couple generations of Atoms were in-order and had 2-way SMT. Pretty quickly, they both switched to out-of-order and dropped SMT.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    jeremyj_83 said:
    The AMD E-cores were vastly better than Intel's Atom cores at the time as well.
    Depends on what you consider "at the time" ,the Atom that was released at the same time as the ps4 was much faster but we have no idea if that was already in the cards at the time sony and ms shopped around for a new cpu.

    Not that it matters since intel would never sell their cores cheap enough for the console makers.

    https://www.neogaf.com/threads/anandtech-intels-new-atom-cpu-beats-amds-jaguar-in-performance.677101/
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TerryLaze said:
    Depends on what you consider "at the time" ,the Atom that was released at the same time as the ps4 was much faster but we have no idea if that was already in the cards at the time sony and ms shopped around for a new cpu.
    Yeah, Silvermont had a process node advantage and I think is widely regarded as the first "good" Atom-class core. It dates back to when Intel was still playing for the phone/tablet SoC market.

    BTW, here's the actual Anandtech article referenced in that forum post:
    https://www.anandtech.com/show/7314/intel-baytrail-preview-intel-atom-z3770-tested
    Also, that post quoted three single-threaded benchmarks. In 7-zip (not specified whether compression or decompression), the Atom was about 25.1% faster, at similar clocks. In Cinebench R11.5 (ST), they basically tied (if you look at the original Anandtech article, they also tie on Cinebench MT!). In the Chrome browser's performance on the Mozilla Kraken benchmark, Atom won by a whopping 41.6%. There are two other CPU benchmarks not quoted in that post, where the Atom's lead was smaller (but still sizeable).

    TerryLaze said:
    Not that it matters since intel would never sell their cores cheap enough for the console makers.
    I'd also like to point out that, until Alder Lake-N, Intel shipped their consumer-focused E-core SoCs in configurations consisting of a max of 4 cores. We can't know if they'd have gone up to 8 cores for these consoles. If not, then Jaguar would still take a multi-threaded performance lead.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    bit_user said:
    We can't know if they'd have gone up to 8 cores for these consoles. If not, then Jaguar would still take a multi-threaded performance lead.
    That's not even the biggest issue, intel wouldn't be able to incorporate good enough graphics for a console.
    They could now though.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    BTW, I think AMD's strategy of going all-in on Zen proved wise. If they had continued developing their E-cores, perhaps it would've unlocked some lower-cost markets for them, but the Zen series cores have generally been smaller than their Intel counterparts, which has helped AMD in partially addressing lower market tiers with it. And now they have the C-series.
    You couldn't be more right about this one, especially in terms of business health (and market health as we're all benefiting from that choice).

    I still think this is my favorite example of how far AMD came overall: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-an-xbox-one-s-apu-the-chuwi-aerobox-review/4
    Reply
  • bit_user
    thestryker said:
    I still think this is my favorite example of how far AMD came overall: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16336/installing-windows-on-an-xbox-one-s-apu-the-chuwi-aerobox-review/4
    zOMG, look at this 2c/4t Zen 1 APU matching 8c Jaguar!

    There might be even more stark examples, but I don't know how well-multithreaded most of the other tests are. Obviously, the single-threaded ones are a bloodbath for Jaguar.
    Reply