AMD's Turnaround How PlayStation 4 Saved the Company and Fueled Growth
On July 4th, TapTechNews reported that according to the information disclosed in the LinkedIn profile of an AMD executive, the release of Sony's PlayStation 4 helped AMD avoid bankruptcy.
Renato Fragale is currently the senior director of AMD's OEM consumer and gaming client business. He wrote in his LinkedIn profile: I led a 15-person product development team responsible for the Sony PlayStation 4 project, which has sold over 91 million units so far. The PS4 is considered one of the most successful projects in AMD's history and it helped AMD tide over the bankruptcy crisis. Fragale was precisely the senior manager in charge of PS4 product development engineering at that time.
The PS4 was released in November 2013 and adopted an x86 architecture chip, replacing the Cell architecture-based chip of PS3, and these chips are precisely provided by AMD. In fact, AMD has been deeply involved in the development of game consoles. As early as 2006, the ATI company acquired by AMD provided chips for the GameCube and Wii, and also provided the Xenos GPU graphics card for the Xbox 360.
After acquiring ATI, AMD not only provided chips for the PS4 but also powered the current-generation game consoles with its RDNA2 architecture. In addition, many handheld consoles including the SteamDeck also use AMD's custom chips.
TapTechNews should point out that the 91 million unit sales data mentioned by Fragale is outdated. According to current estimates and official Sony data, the total sales of PS4 have exceeded 117 million units.
Compared to 2013, AMD has taken on a completely new look today. Since then, AMD's product line in the PC hardware field has been fully revitalized. The Ryzen and Threadripper series CPUs have received wide acclaim for their excellent cost-effectiveness and have an excellent reputation among gamers and professionals. Although temporarily unable to compete with NVIDIA in the graphics card market, AMD's RX series graphics cards still maintain their competitiveness.
We can also more intuitively feel the impact of PS4 by comparing AMD's financial report data. In 2013, AMD announced a net loss of 83 million US dollars, and the total revenue of that year was 5.3 billion US dollars, a decrease of 2% year-on-year. However, only one year later, that is, in 2014 after the release of PS4, AMD's revenue increased to 5.51 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 4%. Although the net loss that year expanded to 403 million US dollars, it showed a growth trend overall. This growth trend has continued until recent years, and AMD's total revenue in 2023 reached 22.7 billion US dollars.