AMD to Enter the FPGA Market, in Advanced Talks to Acquire Xilinx

[TehDwonz]

On 10/9/2020 at 4:36 AM, themaniac said:

I know AMD has been making a lot of good money and have been growing a lot in the last few years. But can they really afford to spend $30billion right now? Sure it could be of massive benefit to them, but the last time AMD made a large purchase iirc was ATI and im sure most of us know what happened.

The licensing model income from Xilinx clients is not insignificant. It's a successful business that's been around a long time. ATI is not comparable - think more nVidia buying ARM. It's that league of "wise acquisitions".

[TehDwonz]

On 10/9/2020 at 6:19 PM, thorhammerz said:

Like NVDA's purchase of ARM, a deal of this size would likely only be partially paid-for in cash, with the rest being equity. With the equity market where it is, they gotta get while the going is good .

Exactly, and the comparisons to the old ATI purchase is a bad comparison too. This entirely a good move for AMD. I think maybe a lot of people commenting don't really understand Xilinx...

[Fatih19]

22 minutes ago, TehDwonz said:

Exactly, and the comparisons to the old ATI purchase is a bad comparison too. This entirely a good move for AMD. I think maybe a lot of people commenting don't really understand Xilinx...

Can you elaborate, cause yes we don't really understand Xilinx.

[Belgarathian]

Isn't Xilinx the company they're using to design their MB chipsets?

 

Edit: Nope, never mind. It was ASMedia, but the 570 was mostly done in house with some ASMedia IP.

[igormp]

9 hours ago, Fatih19 said:

Can you elaborate, cause yes we don't really understand Xilinx.

Not him, but xilinx is the biggest FPGA player in the market as of now (around 50% of the market share iirc).

 

FPGAs are a highly strategic resource for communications, automotive, industrial and even military scenarios where you need high throughput, low latency data processing.  It's perfect for when you need high specialized hardware, but can't afford enough units for a custom ASIC. Also, many ASICs start off as FPGA projects before being sent to a fab.

 

Most high bandwidth networking and media processing is being done with FPGAs nowadays, a field where nvidia is trying to get into with GPUs. If you open up one of those dedicated video encoders, you'll likely see a FPGA in there.

[Lakobrija]

Can somebody explain to me what this company do? I wikipedia them and found out that they are some kind of programming company, but can't really figure out what really they do

[igormp]

1 minute ago, Lakobrija said:

Can somebody explain to me what this company do? I wikipedia them and found out that they are some kind of programming company, but can't really figure out what really they do

In layman's terms, FPGAs are basically a "blank chip" that you can program "hardware" with. You can make basic stuff from a simple adder that takes 2 numbers and outputs another number, or more complex things like a CPU or really specific purpose accelerators (like video encoding/decoding or ML inference).

 

The best thing is that you can reprogram those, so you can iterate quickly (for hardware standards) over your product without much material cost.

[Bombastinator]

For those such as myself who have to look up what an FPGA even is:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array

Apparently it’s a wild development of eprom, but for everything.  Sort of. I found the history bit useful for describing what the things do.