What They Say
- The chip industry consolidation dance continued as AMD has entered into an agreement to buy Xilinx for $35 billion, giving the company access to a broad set of specialized workloads.
- AMD sees this deal as combining two companies that complement each other’s strengths without cannibalizing its own markets, and believes the acquisition will help make the company the high performance chip leader.
- While the deal has been approved by both company’s boards of directors, it still has to pass muster with shareholders and regulators, and is not expected to close until the end of next year.
What We Think
There has been real consolidation this year in the chip business. AMD has been doing well this year, with sales and profits up. Xilinx has been very successful in the custom chip and FPGA business and we have often met with the company at shows such as IBC and ISE as the leading edge of video processing has often made use of the firm’s technology to support lower volume or earlier, lower volume chips. Lets hope that little is lost in that part of the business. If there is a good result for the industry, there will be even tighter integration between custom chips and AMD’s GPUs and CPUs. We reported on the work Xilinx did in extending the way FPGAs can be integrated with ‘off-the-shelf’ processors’ back in 2018. (Xilinx Unveils ACAP Programmable SoC
For AMD, the deal may allow the development of lower volume specialised chips for servers and other applications. (BR)
