Acquisitions make up most part of this week’s article. Catching up on some of the news from the last thirty days, the AMD-Xilinx deal inevitably stands out – clearly no longer as a fresh update, but as a topic that deserves some reflections. We will therefore take a look at some of the comments that have been published by the media. Coincidentally, several more acquisitions were announced over the past few weeks – clearly much smaller, but still significant in their respective markets.
AMD-Xilinx deal: some comments from the media
With the acquisition of Xilinx, AMD hopes to create “the industry’s High Performance Computing leader”. The future scenario for HPC silicon, therefore, could be characterized by three major competitors: Nvidia (with the recent addition of Arm), Intel (which bought Altera in 2015), and the AMD-Xilinx combination. Sally Ward-Foxton on EETimes asks a question that is key to figure out the future competitive landscape: “Is AMD trying to build a complete data center computing platform, similar to what Nvidia is trying to do with Arm?” She also observes that “Nvidia has plans to combine Mellanox’ SmartNICs with Arm CPU accelerators and VLIW acceleration blocks to make what it calls a DPU (…). AMD doesn’t have anything in this area, but Xilinx does — a SmartNIC platform based on its FPGAs was launched this spring.” Commenting the new scenario, Kris Kachris on SemiWiki anticipates less freedom of choice for customers: “We are moving on the era of Heterogeneous Data Processing Platforms where computing platforms will include SmartNICs, multi-core processors and hardware accelerators and the user will have to select a complete solution instead of mix-and-match. Intel, AMD and Nvidia will offer complete computing platforms with their own proprietary accelerators and SmartNICs. (…) the option to select the best of each world will not be feasible any more or at least it will be more challenging.”
