AMD controls a large piece of client PC
processor pi and while they still lag behind Intel in terms of market share
team red is clearly in no danger of being pushed out of the CPU scene but
that wasn't always the case back in the late 2000s AMD was getting hit hard by
the financial crisis but even aside from that they were having their lunch money
taken by Intel the first generation of the core i7 was rolling out and it along
with other Intel products had markedly better performance than AMD's offerings
AMD had to lay off workers cut pay for those they actually retained and even
sold off their mobile division to Qualcomm according to an AMD engineer
the company was on the verge of bankruptcy with their stock price at one
point dipping below two bucks a share but they were able to stay afloat
because of a fortuitous occurrence and no they didn't suddenly figure out how
to make CPUs that didn't suck as that didn't happen until 2017 I'm talking
about the fact that Sony and Microsoft chose AMD to make the process inside
their new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game consoles you see in the late 2000s
and early 2010s we were already used to the idea of consoles being used for more
than just gaming both the PS2 and original Xbox could play DVDs for
example however there was still a long way to go before people thought of
consoles as PC like appliances the way many do today and it didn't help that
the two most popular consoles of the time the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360
didn't use the x86 based processors that you'd find in PCS both systems instead
use chips based on the very different Power PC architecture with the PS3
specifically using a chip called cell co-designed by Toshiba IBM and Sony
itself while the Xbox 360 used a similar IBM chip called Xenon although the cell
was supposed to help provide computational Power for graphics rendering it was notoriously difficult
to program for a major contributor to the tepid reviews of the PS3 early in
its life cycle as there simply weren't very many games for it that people
actually wanted to play and the non-traditional architecture was a
barrier for the developers of non-game apps as well on both the PlayStation and
Xbox to make these consoles into more PC
like do-it-all home entertainment devices it was clear that both companies
needed to use a CPU with a more popular architecture in their nextg consoles
that meant using x86 which was not only
much more powerful than the arm Solutions of the day but it was easier
to code for important for getting developers of streaming and smart home
apps on board but hold on a sec why did they choose AMD instead of the market
leader Intel seeing as x86 is also team
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world today although Intel was still
running laps around AMD and PC land when the PS4 released in 2013 one thing AMD
had that Intel didn't was recent experience in high performance Graphics
especially since they acquired ATI and its Radeon brand back in 2006 although
Intel CPUs did still have integrated Graphics AMD had already been focused on
trying to combine higher performance gpus with CPUs on the same die for years
which eventually culminated in the first accelerated Processing Unit or Apu in
201 while apus weren't as powerful as
higher-end discret graphics cards they still offered more Graphics horsepower
than what Intel had and it also certainly helped that AMD was a lot more
willing than Intel to do semi-custom designs for outside clients and since
consoles fight against heat and power limitations it was more attractive to
Sony and Microsoft to go for an S so that had the CPU and GPU on the same
chip rather than breaking them out into separate chips meaning they weren't very
interested in getting a company like NVIDIA another AMD rival to make a
discret graphics processor NVIDIA did of course end up having a chip in the
Nintendo switch the Tegra X1 but it wouldn't have been powerful enough for
the PS4 or Xbox One and indeed not
powerful enough for the switch either in some people's opinion although AMD's
contracts with Sony and Microsoft didn't suddenly put them on top of the world
they did keep them afloat as over 175
million total PS4s and Xbox Ones were shipped before being replaced by the
ninth gen consoles and of course AMD really return to prominence in 2017
after the launch of their very successful Zen CPU lineup but there's a
good chance we never would have gotten Zen if not for console Gamers scooping
up so many AMD chips so if you're a pcmr
Die Hard you might owe them a grudging
thank you I know it hurts but it doesn't hurt me that you watched the whole video
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