Rubbish. AMD have never been that interested even when they were showing a healthy profit. It seems to be a favourite excuse to use AMD's financial situation now to justify their failings when the truth of the matter is that Jerry Sanders was more interested in spunking cash for lavish parties and
satisfying his ego. Cash plowed into a compiler when AMD started working on their own architecture with NexGen/K6 would have reaped a better return than a bunch of "look at me" Christmas parties
Bear in mind that for a supposedly poor company, AMD generally carried $5-7bn in assets against less than $2bn in debt up until the ATI acquisition.