AMD controls a large piece of client PC processor pie,
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 processors 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 used chips based on the very different PowerPC 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 next-gen 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 Blue's bread and butter?
Although Intel was still running laps around AMD in 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 2011.
While APUs weren't as powerful as higher-end discrete 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 SoC 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 discrete 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 returned 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 diehard,
you might owe them a grudging thank you. I know, it hurts.
But it doesn't hurt me that you watched the whole video. Thanks for watching.
Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, and go check out our video on the history of AMD.
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