AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced that it has received approval from all necessary authorities to proceed with the acquisition of Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX). With the exception of the remaining customary closing conditions, all conditions to the transaction closing have been satisfied and the company expects the transaction to close on or about February 14, 2022.

AMD announced its intention to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction on October 27, 2020. The transaction brings together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership computing platforms for cloud, edge and intelligent end devices.

Chinese regulators have conditionally approved AMD's $35 billion acquisition of specialty programmable logic device company Xilinx. The purchase had already been approved in every other market so this final approval should allow the deal to quickly progress provided both parties agree to the conditions set out by the Chinese market regulator. These requirements include a commitment to ensuring that Xilinx FPGAs remain compatible with ARM-based processors and products used in the Chinese market. This deal will help make AMD more competitive with Intel which has previously purchased a similar FPGA company with Altera for $16.7 billion in 2015.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today released the following statement related to the status of global regulatory approvals for AMD's proposed acquisition of Xilinx. "We continue making good progress on the required regulatory approvals to close our transaction. While we had previously expected that we would secure all approvals by the end of 2021, we have not yet completed the process and we now expect the transaction to close in the first quarter of 2022. Our conversations with regulators continue to progress productively, and we expect to secure all required approvals."

There are no additional changes to the previously announced terms or plans regarding the transaction and the companies continue to look forward to the proposed combination creating the industry's high-performance and adaptive computing leader.

The semicondustor market in 3Q21 is red hot with total revenue of the global top 10 IC design (fabless) companies reaching US$33.7 billion or 45% growth YoY, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In addition to the Taiwanese companies MediaTek, Novatek, and Realtek already on the list, Himax comes in at number ten, bringing the total number of Taiwanese companies on the top 10 list to 4.

Qualcomm has been buoyed by continuing robust demand for 5G mobile phones form major mobile phone manufacturers with further revenue growth from its processor and radio frequency front end (RFFE) departments. Qualcomm's IoT department benefited from strong demand in the consumer electronics, edge networking, and industrial sectors, posting revenue growth of 66% YoY, highest among Qualcomm departments. In turn, this drove Qualcomm's total 3Q21 revenue to US$7.7 billion, 56% growth YoY, and ranking first in the world.

AMD later this month is preparing to address investors as part of a yet-unknown event. The company typically hosts Financial Analyst Day events around Q1-Q2, and goes to the investors with substantial material on the current state of the organization, the products on offer, what's on the horizon, and how it could impact the company's financials. An alleged presentation related to the November 2021 event was leaked to the web. The presentation provides a guided tour of the entire product portfolio of the company, spanning server processors, compute accelerators, consumer graphics, some client processors, and the semi-custom business.

The presentation outlines that the company has so far successfully executed its roadmaps for the client-CPU, server-CPU, graphics, and compute-accelerator segments. In the client CPU segment, it shows a successful execution up to 2021 with the "Zen 3" microarchitecture. In the server space, it mentions successful execution for its EPYC processors up to "Zen 3" with its "Milan" processors, and confirms that its next-generation "Zen 4" microarchitecture, and its sister-architecture, the "Zen 4c," will be built on the 5 nm silicon fabrication node (likely TSMC N5). The presentation also details the recently announced "Milan-X" processor for existing SP3 platforms, which debuts the 3D Vertical Cache technology, bringing up to 96 MB of L3 cache per CCD, and up to 768 MB of L3 cache (804 MB L1+L2+L3 cache) per socket.Update 10:54 UTC: The presentation can now be found on the AMD Investor Relations website.

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive computing, today at the SC21 supercomputing conference introduced the Alveo U55C data center accelerator card and a new standards-based, API-driven clustering solution for deploying FPGAs at massive scale. The Alveo U55C accelerator brings superior performance-per-watt to high performance computing (HPC) and database workloads and easily scales through the Xilinx HPC clustering solution.

Purpose-built for HPC and big data workloads, the new Alveo U55C card is the company's most powerful Alveo accelerator card ever, offering the highest compute density and HBM capacity in the Alveo accelerator portfolio. Together with the new Xilinx RoCE v2-based clustering solution, a broad spectrum of customers with large-scale compute workloads can now implement powerful FPGA-based HPC clustering using their existing data center infrastructure and network.

In view of the ongoing production capacity shortage in the semiconductor industry and the resultant price hike of chips, revenue of the top 10 IC design companies for 2Q21 reached US$29.8 billion, a 60.8% YoY increase, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, Taiwanese companies put up remarkable performances during this period, with both MediaTek and Novatek posting YoY growths of more than 95%. AMD, on the other hand, experienced a nearly 100% YoY revenue growth, the highest among the top 10.

TrendForce indicates that the ranking of the top five companies for 2Q21 remained unchanged from the previous quarter, although there were major changes in the 6th to 10th spots. More specifically, after finalizing its acquisition of Inphi, Marvell experienced a major revenue growth and leapfrogged Xilinx and Realtek in the rankings from 9th place in 1Q21 to 7th place in 2Q21.

Samsung Electronics the world leader in advanced memory technology, today showcased its latest advancements with processing-in-memory (PIM) technology at Hot Chips 33—a leading semiconductor conference where the most notable microprocessor and IC innovations are unveiled each year. Samsung's revelations include the first successful integration of its PIM-enabled High Bandwidth Memory (HBM-PIM) into a commercialized accelerator system, and broadened PIM applications to embrace DRAM modules and mobile memory, in accelerating the move toward the convergence of memory and logic.

In February, Samsung introduced the industry's first HBM-PIM (Aquabolt-XL), which incorporates the AI processing function into Samsung's HBM2 Aquabolt, to enhance high-speed data processing in supercomputers and AI applications. The HBM-PIM has since been tested in the Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale+ (Alveo) AI accelerator, where it delivered an almost 2.5X system performance gain as well as more than a 60% cut in energy consumption.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2021 of $3.85 billion, operating income of $831 million, net income of $710 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.58. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $924 million, net income was $778 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.63.

"Our business performed exceptionally well in the second quarter as revenue and operating margin doubled and profitability more than tripled year-over-year," said AMD president and CEO Lisa Su. "We are growing significantly faster than the market with strong demand across all of our businesses. We now expect our 2021 annual revenue to grow by approximately 60 percent year-over-year driven by strong execution and increased customer preference for our leadership products."

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive computing, today introduced the Versal HBM adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP), the newest series in the Versal portfolio. The Versal HBM series enables the convergence of fast memory, secure connectivity, and adaptable compute in a single platform. Versal HBM ACAPs integrate the most advanced HBM2E DRAM, providing 820 GB/s of throughput and 32 GB of capacity for 8X more memory bandwidth and 63% lower power than DDR5 implementations. The Versal HBM series is architected to keep up with the higher memory needs of the most compute intensive, memory bound applications for data center, wired networking, test and measurement, and aerospace and defense.

"Many real-time, high-performance applications are critically bottlenecked by memory bandwidth and operate at the edge of their power and thermal limits," said Sumit Shah, senior director, Product Management and Marketing at Xilinx. "The Versal HBM series eliminates those bottlenecks to provide our customers with a solution that delivers significantly higher performance and reduced system power, latency, form factor, and total cost of ownership for data center and network operators."

AMD's ambitious acquisition of Xilinx, makers of cutting-edge FPGAs, has been approved by the UK Competition and Markets Authority. This would go down as AMD's biggest tech acquisition, as the company is forking out USD $35 billion in stock. If it goes through, the AMD-Xilinix combine will see current AMD shareholders own 74% of the company, and current Xilinx shareholders with the other 26%. Both companies announced in April 2021 that their shareholders "overwhelmingly" approved of the deal. The Xilinx buyout by AMD isn't too far behind in terms of value, to NVIDIA's ambitious $40 billion bid to acquire Arm Holdings.Many Thanks to DeathtoGnomes for the tip

British competition regulator Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Monday, launched an enquiry into the ramifications of AMD's buy-out of FPGA maker Xilinx. The agency is soliciting opinions from the public on whether the $35 billion all-stock purchase will make goods and services less competitive for the UK. Unlike NVIDIA's Arm buyout the Xilinx acquisition is seeing no opposition from tech-giants. The Register notes that AMD could combine Xilinx's FPGAs with its x86 CPU and RDNA SIMD to create highly customizable HPC accelerators. AMD president Dr Lisa Su said "By combining our world-class engineering team 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, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX), the leader in adaptive computing, today announced record revenues of $851 million for the fiscal fourth quarter, up 6% over the previous quarter and an increase of 13% year over year. Fiscal 2021 revenues were $3.15 billion, largely flat from the prior fiscal year. GAAP net income for the fiscal fourth quarter was $188 million, or $0.75 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for the quarter was $204 million, or $0.82 per diluted share. GAAP net income for fiscal year 2021 was $647 million, or $2.62 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income for fiscal year 2021 was $762 million, or $3.08 per diluted share.

Additional fourth quarter of fiscal year 2021 comparisons are provided in the charts below. "We are pleased with our fourth quarter results as we delivered record revenues and double-digit year-over-year growth in the midst of a challenging supply chain environment," said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO. "Xilinx saw further improvement in demand across a majority of our diversified end markets with key strength in our Wireless, Data Center and Automotive markets, the pillars of our growth strategy. Our teams have executed well and we remain focused on continuing to meet customers' critical needs.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) and Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ:XLNX) announced today that stockholders voted to approve their respective proposals relating to the pending acquisition of Xilinx by AMD. The acquisition will bring together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership in computing platforms for cloud, edge and end devices. Together, the combined company will have the ability to capitalize on opportunities spanning some of the industry's most important growth segments, including data centers, gaming, PCs, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and defense.

"For several years, AMD has successfully executed our long-term growth strategy and deepened the company's partnerships to drive high performance computing leadership," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "The acquisition of Xilinx marks the next leg in our journey to make AMD the strategic partner of choice for the largest and most important technology companies in the world as an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to support their future innovation."

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 1H20 seemed at first poised to devastate the IC design industry. However, as WFH and distance education became the norm, TrendForce finds that the demand for notebook computers and networking products also spiked in response, in turn driving manufacturers to massively ramp up their procurement activities for components. Fabless IC design companies that supply such components therefore benefitted greatly from manufacturers' procurement demand, and the IC design industry underwent tremendous growth in 2020. In particular, the top three IC design companies (Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Nvidia) all posted YoY increases in their revenues, with Nvidia registering the most impressive growth, at a staggering 52.2% increase YoY, the highest among the top 10 companies.

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive computing, today announced the company has expanded its UltraScale+ portfolio for markets with new applications that require ultra-compact and intelligent edge solutions. With form factors that are 70 percent smaller than traditional chip-scale packaging, the new Artix and Zynq UltraScale+ devices can now address a wider range of applications within the industrial, vision, healthcare, broadcast, consumer, automotive, and networking markets.

As the world's only hardware adaptable cost-optimized portfolio based on 16 nanometer technology, Artix and Zynq UltraScale+ devices are available in TSMC's state-of-the-art InFO (Integrated Fan-Out) packaging technology. Using InFO, Artix and Zynq UltraScale+ devices meet the need for intelligent edge applications by delivering high-compute density, performance-per-watt, and scalability in compact packaging options.

Addressing the demands of the modern data center, Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced a range of new data center products and solutions, including a new family of Alveo SmartNICs, smart world AI video analytics applications, an accelerated algorithmic trading reference design for sub-microsecond trading, and the Xilinx App Store.

Today's most demanding and complex applications, from networking and AI analytics to financial trading, require low-latency and real-time performance. Achieving this level of performance has been limited to expensive and lengthy hardware development. With these new products and solutions, Xilinx is eliminating the barriers for software developers to quickly create and deploy software-defined, hardware accelerated applications on Alveo accelerator cards.

Xilinx, Inc.,, the leader in adaptive computing, today announced that the company is supplying its leading UltraScale+ technology to Fujitsu Limited for its O-RAN 5G radio units (O-RUs). Fujitsu O-RUs using Xilinx technology will be deployed in the first O-RAN-compliant 5G greenfield networks in the U.S. Fujitsu is also evaluating Xilinx RFSoC technology to further reduce cost and power consumption for additional future site deployments.

Fujitsu O-RUs are ideal for a broad-range of spectrum and multi-band applications for 5G O-RAN networks. The Xilinx UltraScale+ devices used within Fujitsu O-RUs deliver the best balance of cost economies as well as the adaptability and scalability required for the evolving needs of 5G O-RAN network requirements. Additionally, Xilinx will continue to work with other O-RAN ecosystem partners to ensure continued validation of the hardware and software necessary for world-class 5G networks.

AMD has applied for a United States Patent that describes a CPU design with FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) elements integrated into its core design. Titled "Method and Apparatus for Efficient Programmable Instructions in Computer Systems", the patent application describes a CPU with FPGA elements inscribed into its very core design, where the FPGA elements actually share CPU resources such as registers for floating-point and integer execution units. This patent undoubtedly comes in the wake of AMD's announced Xilinx acquisition plans, and brings FPGA and CPU marriages to a whole other level. FPGA,as the name implies, are hardware constructions which can reconfigure themselves according to predetermined tables (which can also be updated) to execute desired and specific functions.

Intel have themselves already shipped a CPU + FPGA combo in the same package; the company's Xeon 6138P, for example, includes an Arria 10 GX 1150 FPGA on-package, offering 1,150,000 logic elements. However, this is simply a CPU + FPGA combo on the same substrate; not a native, core-integrated FPGA design. Intel's product has severe performance and latency penalties due to the fact that complex operations performed in the FPGA have to be brought out of the CPU, processed in the FPGA, and then its results have to be returned to the CPU. AMD's design effectively ditches that particular roundabout, and should thus allow for much higher performance.

Xilinx, Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today announced the availability of the Samsung SmartSSD Computational Storage Drive (CSD). Powered by Xilinx FPGAs, the SmartSSD CSD is the industry's first adaptable computational storage platform providing the performance, customization, and scalability required by data-intensive applications.

Xilinx will showcase the SmartSSD CSD and partner solutions at the Flash Memory Summit Virtual Conference and Expo taking place November 10-12. The SmartSSD CSD is a flexible, programmable storage platform that developers can use to create a variety of unique and scalable accelerators that solve a broad range of data center problems. It empowers a new breed of software developers to easily build innovative hardware-accelerated solutions in familiar high-level languages. The SmartSSD CSD accelerates data processing performance by 10x or more for applications such as database management, video processing, artificial intelligence layers, complex search, and virtualization.

AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for AMD to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction valued at $35 billion. The combination will create the industry's leading high performance computing company, significantly expanding the breadth of AMD's product portfolio and customer set across diverse growth markets where Xilinx is an established leader. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to AMD margins, EPS and free cash flow generation and deliver industry-leading growth.

The acquisition brings together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers. AMD will offer the industry's strongest portfolio of high performance processor technologies, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership computing platforms for cloud, edge and end devices. Together, the combined company will capitalize on opportunities spanning some of the industry's most important growth segments from the data center to gaming, PCs, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and defense.

AMD is planning to enter the FPGA market by buying out one of Intel's largest competitors, Xilinx. The Wall Street Journal reports that AMD is in "advanced talks" to acquire the San Jose-based firm which specializes in FPGAs of all shapes and sizes, including large, high logic cell-count FPGAs under the Virtex UltraScale brand, the main competitor to Intel's Stratix 10. Xilinx is valued at $26 billion, although analysts estimate the AMD acquisition to go down at close to $30 billion, making it one of the largest tech acquisitions of the year, after NVIDIA's buyout of Arm from Softbank. An FPGA lineup would give AMD a near complete portfolio of computing hardware IP: CPUs with x86 and Arm licenses, GPUs, GPU-based scalar compute processors, semi-custom SoCs, low-power media processors, and now FPGA.

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, today introduced two real-time computing video appliances for easy-to-scale, ultra-high-density video transcoding applications. Based on the new Xilinx Real-Time (RT) Server reference architecture, these new appliances will enable service providers delivering applications such as eSports and game streaming platforms, social and video conferencing, live distance learning, telemedicine and live broadcast video to optimize video quality and bitrate at the lowest cost per channel for significant TCO savings over both software-based and fixed-architecture approaches.

Designed for edge and on-premise compute-intensive workloads where video channel density, throughput and latency are critical requirements, the new Xilinx Real-Time Video Appliances feature optimized hardware architectures and software to deliver the industry's highest channel density and lowest latency performance. The appliances are available in two pre-configured options integrating Xilinx Alveo data center accelerator cards - the High Channel Density Video Appliance and the Ultra-Low Bitrate Video Appliance.

Xilinx, Inc., the leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, today announced the industry's first 20-nanometer (nm) space-grade FPGA, delivering full radiation tolerance and ultra-high throughput and bandwidth performance for satellite and space applications. The new 20 nm Radiation Tolerant (RT) Kintex UltraScale XQRKU060 FPGA provides true unlimited on-orbit reconfiguration, over a 10x increase in digital signal processing (DSP) performance - ideal for payload applications - and full radiation tolerance across all orbits.

The XQRKU060 also brings high performance machine learning (ML) to space for the first time. A diverse portfolio of ML development tools supporting industry standard frameworks, including TensorFlow and PyTorch, enable neural network inference acceleration for real-time on-board processing in space with a complete "process and analyze" solution. The XQRKU060's dense, power-efficient compute with scalable precision and large on-chip memory, provides 5.7 tera operations per second (TOPs) of peak INT8 performance optimized for deep learning, a nearly 25X increase compared to the prior generation.

Today the Hot Chips program committee officially announced the August conference line-up, posted to hotchips.org. For this first-ever live-streamed Hot Chips Symposium, the program is better than ever!

In a session on deep learning training for data centers, we have a mix of talks from the internet giant Google showcasing their TPUv2 and TPUv3, and a talk from startup Cerebras on their 2nd gen wafer-scale AI solution, as well as ETH Zurich's 4096-core RISC-V based AI chip. And in deep learning inference, we have talks from several of China's biggest AI infrastructure companies: Baidu, Alibaba, and SenseTime. We also have some new startups that will showcase their interesting solutions—LightMatter talking about its optical computing solution, and TensTorrent giving a first-look at its new architecture for AI.