What They Say
AMD has completed its purchase of Xilinx after more than a year of processing. Some reports put the deal value at $50 billion as the deal was made based on AMD stock when the price was much lower. (AMD acquiring Xilinx in $35B semiconductor mega-deal). However, others, including Forbes, rated it at $35 billion.
What We Think
It’s six years or so since we reported from Infocomm 2015 that Xilinx was moving towards integrating its established FPGA business with more general purpose computing, at that time based on Arm cores. (Xilinx Has Advantages for UltraHD and 8K). The firms technology has been a key part of many video processing systems and peripherals over the years, especially at the cutting edge of codecs, resolution and performance. It will be interesting to see if AMD has new ways of exploiting the technology.
Our friend, Jon Peddie, sees the deal as a good one for AMD, even though it paid a bit more than Intel did for Altera when viewed as a multiple of revenues. He likes the work that Xilinx has done to make programming FPGAs easier to design and ‘into the object-oriented synthesis realm’. (BR)
Xilinx was promoting tighter integration four years ago
