AMD buys Xilinx for $35 billion all stock deal.

AlexGoesHigh · October 27, 2020

The rumors have been confirmed. AMD has bought Xilinx, a fabless semiconductor maker that specializes in FPGA and Smart-NIC's in a $35 billion all stock transaction that will unify both companies in the AMD name. Xilinx becoming a new division of the company.

Details of the deal is that AMD is valuing Xilinx at $134 per share, current AMD shareholders will own 74% of the combined company, Xilinx shareholders will retain the remainder 26%. This will result in a company worth $135 billion with 13000 engineers in it and a $110 billion addressable market.

These are the CEO of both companies remarks regarding the deal.

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AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su

“Our acquisition of Xilinx marks the next leg in our journey to establish AMD as the industry’s high performance computing leader and partner of choice for the largest and most important technology companies in the world. This is truly a compelling combination that will create significant value for all stakeholders, including AMD and Xilinx shareholders who will benefit from the future growth and upside potential of the combined company. The Xilinx team is one of the strongest in the industry and we are thrilled to welcome them to the AMD family. By combining our world-class engineering teams and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing.”

Xilinx CEO Victor Peng

“We are excited to join the AMD family. Our shared cultures of innovation, excellence and collaboration make this an ideal combination. Together, we will lead the new era of high performance and adaptive computing. Our leading FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs, accelerator and SmartNIC solutions enable innovation from the cloud, to the edge and end devices. We empower our customers to deploy differentiated platforms to market faster, and with optimal efficiency and performance. Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our data center business and enable us to pursue a broader customer base across more markets.”

Details:

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As part of the acquisition, Victor Peng will join AMD as president responsible for the Xilinx business, and at least two Xilinx directors will join the AMD Board of Directors upon closing.

Part of the enablement of the acquisition is AMD leveraging its market capitalization of ~$100 billion, and a lot of the industry will draw parallels of Intel’s acquisition of FPGA-manufacturer Altera in December 2015 for $16.7 billion. The high-performance FPGA markets, as well as SmartNICs, adaptive SoCs, and other controllable logic, reside naturally in the data center markets more than most other markets. With AMD’s recent growth in the enterprise space with its Zen-based EPYC processor lines, a natural evolution one might conclude would be synergizing high-performance compute with adaptable logic under one roof, which is precisely the conclusion that Intel also came to several years ago. AMD reported last quarter that it had broken above the 10% market share in Enterprise with its EPYC product lines, and today’s earnings call is also expected to see growth. AMD is already reporting revenue up +56% year on year company-wide, with +116% in the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom markets.

Opinion:

This is huge IMO, on the rumor thread I commented how this can affect AMD and mainly the enterprise market so I'm gonna quote myself on that.

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IMO they are doing this out of need, not to diversify, next year with intel Xe hitting the market, intel will have full stack solutions for all computing needs, Nvidia too will have full stacks in a couple years with ARM and turning melanox into a networking branch in the company, all they are waiting for, is for their impending ARM server CPU to be fully baked and ready, or at the very minimum buy a customized version of a marvel or altera (iirc their name) design to be place into their dgx server and maybe server designs by partners.

And to be clear with what do I mean with full stack is basically produce the major silicon parts that go into a compute platform, intel has CPU, networking and FPGA accelerators in the market now, even storage but that is not very important to now since a third party storage solution can be as good here, but they are only missing GPU and it's coming very soon with Xe. Nvidia has GPU and now recently networking not FPGA but I feel they can sort of brute force their way into what an FPGA would be useful for with their GPU and CUDA, all that remains is a CPU and even though is not gonna be x86, ARM is starting to give both intel and AMD a run for its money especially with hyperscalers (see amazon graviton 2), Nvidia is gonna come full force with something in this space at some point. AMD for its part has CPU and GPU but not networking and FPGA, xilinx can provide FPGA and maybe with a bit of change also networking on the servers.

But even if AMD get xilinx they still need to pull a mayor effort for this to be worthwhile and it's IMO the part that they struggle more and that is software. Intel is combining all the software to develop for their silicon into the oneAPI stack, basically a huge sdk to work on with all hardware functions in all their silicon, this is what is gonna be used in the aurora supercomputer to leverage all the intel silicon that gonna be inside. Nvidia has CUDA for their GPU and just now they announced DOCA for their networking which is aiming to do what CUDA does for their GPU, and like I said the CPU are coming and I bet they are gonna have software for it once it come, so yeah AMD needs to have something better that what they do now and it's gonna be more important that ever if they bring xilinx into the fold to bring full stack solutions.

Both Intel and Nvidia see the future of compute into consolidated full stacks solutions, and compute is were big money is heading towards, AMD buying xilinx is not so much to diversify but to be competitive in the market, for amazing as EPYC is, supercomputers and hyperscalers and big compute needs is not gonna be enough if they want EPYC and radeon into as many servers as possible.

TL;DR: This is a play to be competitive in the future of computing, not something to simply diversify and expand on, this gonna be huge if the rumor holds.

Intel launching high end GPU soon, Nvidia buying ARM and now this, boy the next 10 years are gonna be spicy.

Salsa: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16196/amd-in-35-billion-allstock-acquisition-of-xilinx

Fatih19 · October 27, 2020

6 minutes ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

Intel launching high end GPU soon, Nvidia buying ARM and now this, boy the next 10 years are gonna be spicy.

LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOO!

igormp · October 27, 2020

Holy cow, AMD now has more bases covered than nvidia or Intel on the HPC/DC market. All they need to do now is have proper software to take advantage or their hardware collection.