Intel buying out AMD rumors

[Guest]

Btw I’m totally going to take this ridiculous rumour very seriously.

[Arika]

#TeamBlueForever 

Literally

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

if they do this it'll be back to 4 core cpu's in a few years... i mean they did it for 10 years straight who says they won't go back to it?

[GoldenLag]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

#TeamBlueForever 

Literally

#TeamPurpleAquired

 

12 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

if they do this it'll be back to 4 core cpu's in a few years... i mean they did it for 10 years straight who says they won't go back to it?

dont you mean 12 core CPUs laptop  CPUs

2 Big Cores that can do stuff and 10 bulldozer "cores" that sit around doing background tasks

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, Lathlaer said:

Yet when Disney was trying to acquire 20th Century Fox they had to pass antitrust approval decisions from Mexico, Brazil, EU Commission, India and China and of course USA. Dunno how that translates to the type of business Intel and AMD do but I just thought I'd throw it into this hypothetical discussion   

It would be interesting to see it actually happen to see how these things role out,  But from my perspective Disney do a lot of business outside of just selling movies.   As far as I know the majority of Intel's business is in the USA with fab and R+D in Israel.  I don't think they have much more than a distribution and marketing presence in the EU.

 

 

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

You have to think about it from a money perspective. Intel won't gain enough from acquiring AMD to justify not being able to sell to the EU. At the end of the day businesses care about profit and keeping stock holders happy. The situation where the EU restricts the sales of their products in the EU would hurt both of those. 

And that is more likely to stop them than needing any approval in the first instance.  

[mr moose]

6 hours ago, S w a t s o n said:

If you want to do business in the EU you need the EU's permission basically. For Intel to absorb AMD's European holdings it would need the EU's blessing for sure. If AMD and intel have any stock on any EU exchange too. I never said it was illegal I said it would be blocked, it 100% would be. Even if it's just because the EU threatens to make intel's life a living hell in the EU region

I think you will find the EU has no power to block the takeover of an American company by another American company.  What they posses at the moment is power to reside over antitrust cases in the EU and block the take over of EU companies. 

[mariushm]

It would never be allowed due to the pair  becoming monopoly in x86 stuff.

Only way i see a super slim chance 2 work would be if they give companies rights to make x86 cpus and they won't and most companies wouldn't want it - arm and risc-v are easier and less bloated.

[Teddy07]

8 hours ago, 79wjd said:

No.

 

/Thread

 

ARM processors (RISC architecture) are gaining ground on x86 processors (CISC design). Maybe ARM will even be the future for desktop CPUs? I could be possible.

 

So I only matters for the short term.

[Master Disaster]

This is about as likely as Apple buying out Microsoft. Intel know this will never be allowed to happen and won't waste money even looking in to it imo.

[leadeater]

20 minutes ago, Teddy07 said:

ARM processors (RISC architecture) are gaining ground on x86 processors (CISC design). 

The whole RISC vs CISC thing is more a misnomer now days. What we think or understand RISC to be as actually at odds with how actual RISC CPUs are today.

 

Quote

A common misunderstanding of the phrase "reduced instruction set computer" is the mistaken idea that instructions are simply eliminated, resulting in a smaller set of instructions.[20] In fact, over the years, RISC instruction sets have grown in size, and today many of them have a larger set of instructions than many CISC CPUs.[21][22] Some RISC processors such as the PowerPC have instruction sets as large as the CISC IBM System/370, for example; conversely, the DEC PDP-8—clearly a CISC CPU because many of its instructions involve multiple memory accesses—has only 8 basic instructions and a few extended instructions.

 

It's becoming harder and harder to label CPU/architectures as RISC or CISC as all of them push for performance and power efficiency and create instruction sets to accelerate common tasks or ones that would greatly benefit from it.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

9 hours ago, SlimyPython said:

Though, I dont think ARM will be in any gaming rigs...

 

ARM may be the dominator for the Laptop market though

i mean ARM servers are already a thing... maybe gaming rigs with ARM in them are yet to come. 

 

[Fnige]

23 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

i mean ARM servers are already a thing... maybe gaming rigs with ARM in them are yet to come. 

 

Ok... but when,

 

also if im right... x86 will be always more powerful then ARM, low powered servers are so power bill doesnt easily exceed revenue

[Taf the Ghost]

AMD64/x86-64 cross-license agreement kills any of these talks by Intel. While it would be possible to acquire AMD, it's a massive technical hurdle, and you're going to piss off Intel in the process. But there are a few companies it would be worth it to go through the hurdle, but that was in 2015/2016.

 

Frankly, I'm still surprised that Apple didn't when they could have bought AMD for 5 Billion USD and put another 2 Billion USD into it and basically fixed all of the problems with the company. Considering the direction Apple was already heading, unless the regulatory hurdles really were that deep, it made a lot of business sense back then. Now, with AMD's stock recovered, the list of companies that could acquire AMD is also a lot smaller. Qualcomm, Nvidia, Dell, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple still. One could toss Cisco and Oracle in there. A roughly ~30 Billion USD asking price is hard for all but a few companies to meet, at this point, beyond the hurdles.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

16 minutes ago, SlimyPython said:

Ok... but when,

 

also if im right... x86 will be always more powerful then ARM, low powered servers are so power bill doesnt easily exceed revenue

not for a while  

 

that is true, but Apple has pulled off chips in the iPad Pro that are powerful enough for most things that general consumers do. if they made a macbook with the iPad pro cpu in it i would think it would be quite fast. 

the issue there is that macOS and everything on it is coded for x86 and porting all that to ARM would be a disaster. just look at Windows on ARM. total faillure and a joke. 

[Fnige]

12 minutes ago, firelighter487 said:

not for a while  

 

that is true, but Apple has pulled off chips in the iPad Pro that are powerful enough for most things that general consumers do. if they made a macbook with the iPad pro cpu in it i would think it would be quite fast. 

the issue there is that macOS and everything on it is coded for x86 and porting all that to ARM would be a disaster. just look at Windows on ARM. total faillure and a joke. 

It may have to be an entirely new OS for arm im guessing

[paddy-stone]

I could see intel buying the GPU side of AMD, they have been rumoured to be interested in GPU business anyway, so I could see that being feasible. But not the CPU... as said before, it would bring a monopoly for the CPU industry.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Taf the Ghost said:

the list of companies that could acquire AMD is also a lot smaller. Qualcomm, Nvidia, Dell, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple still

I would take Nvidia off that list, they are a below 10 billion revenue company and all those others are above 20 billion. It would murder Nvidia just as much as it did Dell for EMC/VMware, if not more so.

[Princess Luna]

Intel can't buy AMD, AMD existence was the only reason why US Government didn't split Intel in half way back.

[Taf the Ghost]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I would take Nvidia off that list, they are a below 10 billion revenue company and all those others are above 20 billion. It would murder Nvidia just as much as it did Dell for EMC/VMware, if not more so.

Nvidia still has the market cap to swing an AMD acquisition, but they'd run into their own regulatory hurdles in a good chunk of the world. And they're the only one those hurdles wouldn't be just about the x86 license.

[TechyBen]

Checks date. No, not April first.

Checks source... not not The Onion satire... worse, is a legit "finance" news publisher.

 

Wow, the planet really is getting stupider.

 

[Edit]

And that includes if Intel was to buy Radeon. That makes sense. As AMD has struggled with it, and it is "spun out" so to speak. However, the reporters need to sort their facts out to know which part of AMD Intel may be making a pass at. As if Intel purchased an AMD fab second hand, that's not even close to "Itnel buying AMD!!! Wow pump stock, run naked in the street, just throw money at us for spreading FUD!!!"

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Nvidia still has the market cap to swing an AMD acquisition, but they'd run into their own regulatory hurdles in a good chunk of the world. And they're the only one those hurdles wouldn't be just about the x86 license.

I very much doubt it, even a mostly crippled AMD would garner the same level of purchase price as EMC. Even though EMC was a 20 billion dollar revenue company and AMD is only 5 billion the technology and patents that AMD hold far exceeds that of EMC, the biggest technology value piece of EMC was their controlling share in VMware anyway.

 

To buy out AMD would likely be another 50+ billion acquisition, with potential to be more than the Dell EMC one. It nearly crippled Dell, at the 50 billion mark it would absolutely do that to Nvidia.

 

Nvidia just isn't that big, even companies like Texas Instruments are much larger and Broadcom is much larger again. Nvidia has also just had an abnormally high performance the last 2 years, 5 billion to 9.7 billion in that time period is just a bubble and growth like that won't be sustained and there is even a risk of decline.

[Taf the Ghost]

5 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I very much doubt it, even a mostly crippled AMD would garner the same level of purchase price as EMC. Even though EMC was a 20 billion dollar revenue company and AMD is only 5 billion the technology and patents that AMD hold far exceeds that of EMC, the biggest technology value piece of EMC was their controlling share in VMware anyway.

 

To buy out AMD would likely be another 50+ billion acquisition, with potential to be more than the Dell EMC one. It nearly crippled Dell, at the 50 billion mark it would absolutely do that to Nvidia.

 

Nvidia just isn't that big, even companies like Texas Instruments are much larger and Broadcom is much larger again. Nvidia has also just had an abnormally high performance the last 2 years, 5 billion to 9.7 billion in that time period is just a bubble and growth like that won't be sustained and there is even a risk of decline.

I never said it'd be a smart acquisition.  I just said they could probably swing it. Though it'd go down as something of a merger approach to get through regulatory & x86 licensing issues. Not that AMD would sign up for that.

 

Broadcom would make a lot of sense, but after they got stuffed on buying Qualcomm, I don't think they'd be allowed to grab AMD. 

 

As much as I don't think AMD would go for that much, you're probably correct. AMD should have been bought out in 2015/2016 by one of the bigger players, but the fact that it wasn't points to it being either a lot harder or far more expensive than it looks at first.

[leadeater]

24 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I never said it'd be a smart acquisition.  I just said they could probably swing it. Though it'd go down as something of a merger approach to get through regulatory & x86 licensing issues. Not that AMD would sign up for that.

I still don't think they could, at the time Dell was bigger than EMC and if they could only just barely do it I don't see a company 3 times smaller being able to. Nvidia in 3-5 years of the current growth could but they'd have to also be planning it for that same time period.

 

24 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Broadcom would make a lot of sense, but after they got stuffed on buying Qualcomm, I don't think they'd be allowed to grab AMD. 

Wasn't really proposing that they would, more that Nvidia actually isn't that big. As tech companies go they are actually only middle of the road, for the larger ones. 

 

Just alone looking at US companies they are down the list, if you add in international companies they fall way down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fortune_500_computer_software_and_information_companies

 

Switching to market cap they are 12th but market cap isn't a good metric to look at for this sort of thing, some perspective on that Dell doesn't even chart in the top 25 for market cap.

 

Edit:

20 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

As much as I don't think AMD would go for that much, you're probably correct. AMD should have been bought out in 2015/2016 by one of the bigger players, but the fact that it wasn't points to it being either a lot harder or far more expensive than it looks at first.

Basically the only things that make it such a high value is you are buying access to the x86 CPU and GPU market, the two biggest markets in hardware tech and both growing very well. The operating costs are also huge which is likely why few would want to, I'd say it's more a liability than an asset.

[vorticalbox]

12 hours ago, fasauceome said:

Again, I have to know, is it even legal?

 

[Taf the Ghost]

@leadeater I forgot HP split itself up.

 

Dell was able to swing the EMC deal because they could issue the Bonds at something ridiculously low. I think it was under 2%. That isn't available now, so Debt would be a lot more expensive.

 

In 2015, I still don't think AMD would have been worth a 10x Revenue deal. (FY2015 revenue was 3.99B with a -660M Net Income on the year.) Especially when you could have LBO'd it for about 7-8 Billion USD.

 

Though, thinking about it, the most likely scenario is something of an industry understanding that Intel would fight off any move for it to happen. AMD is anti-trust insurance for Intel, so they need them to remain viable & in the market. Those Vega M parts would be part of that situation. If anyone remembers when Microsoft was basically keeping Apple alive in the mid-90s so they could keep the DoJ at least somewhat happy, it's probably more like that.