Thursday, October 8th 2020
AMD to Enter the FPGA Market, in Advanced Talks to Acquire Xilinx
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.
Source:
The Wall Street Journal
57 Comments on AMD to Enter the FPGA Market, in Advanced Talks to Acquire Xilinx
Which is to say that it's (valuation) no big deal, really just look at ARM+Nvidia o_O
They were multiple partners. They went over the reticle limit.
I think they helped to design it and UMC manufactured it.
Though that would have a 100% chance of being blocked by China in a severe bout of sour grapes.
Don't think of corporate M&A in terms of your wallet or worth, they operate on an entirely different plane.
"Another trend in the use of FPGAs is hardware acceleration, where one can use the FPGA to accelerate certain parts of an algorithm and share part of the computation between the FPGA and a generic processor.[2] The search engine Bing is noted for adopting FPGA acceleration for its search algorithm in 2014.[40] As of 2018, FPGAs are seeing increased use as AI accelerators including Microsoft's so-termed "Project Catapult"[18] and for accelerating artificial neural networks for machine learning applications. " [wikipedia]
Anything related to "Machine Learning" and "AI" is a very attractive business nowadays. And AMD being now in such a growing and attractive proposition in servers, datacenters, and supercomputers, makes this basically another professional field where there's tech benefits and money to be made.Bloomberg
Plus, of the two major companies of this type of product, one is already owned by Intel.
"In 2016, long-time industry rivals Xilinx and Altera (now an Intel subsidiary) were the FPGA market leaders.[52] At that time, they controlled nearly 90 percent of the market. "
As long as it makes AMD a stronger company in the professional application sphere, which is where the big business tech opportunities are, it will benefit us in the end, since it makes the company more robust.
I think that MAXLD's post was pretty much spot on. Then take into account AMD's chiplets apply that with infinity fabric to FPGA along with a nice helping of CPU/APU/GPU tech and you've got a good set of tools for self learning robotics AMD will have it's terminators before you know it, but seriously there are lots of good applications for that robots that can perform neurosurgery with far less error than any human. There tons of fields where that combined IP portfolio from a merger would benefit a lot. I think there will be a whole trickle down effect if the merger happens on the FPGA front in sweeping amount of area's of technology. Really with the IP they already have it could help usher in a fairly new era of computing in a much more cohesive way cognitive computing. Imagine a singular chip with infinity fabric with FPGA/CPU/GPU chiplets and several cores on each of those and throw in some 3D stacking as well.
The future looks bright and maybe we'll see a bit of quantum computing as well. I could see a optical path potentially interconnecting them all quickly as well. I wonder if AMD will do some Wifi/Bluetooth chiplets too that could even be interesting as a interconnect between different regions of those 3 chips. It might not make sense in all cases, but in some wouldn't be bad and more practical than a multi socket solution for example in like a robotic with different chips in different regions of the robot controlling and analyzing things.
Something that crossed my mind not too far back is something a bit like Vulkan on software and hardware side that numerous players could modify and adapt profile use case schemes for it. A open ended software/hardware Vulkan inspired FPGA combination. Something that's part fixed and yet re-programmable to a degree on the hardware and software side of things perhaps in both area's to a degree. Perhaps FPGA's could be useful for variable rate shading methods especially given it's a emerging field of usage. See that's the beauty to the FPGA being programmable new and emerging API's or revisions to existing ones and ways of doing things could be adapted to current hardware to some degree or another more easily aka partly cognitive programmability.
Still, I'll take the correction.
AMD might have an answer.
Plus like all/ most chip developers/designers, the use of FPGA to simulate designs is prolific.
I'm pretty sure Xilinx will do well under AMD, they just need to structure the deal with minimal debt on the books.
Either way, this seems like a sensible step for them.
www.xilinx.com/
www.slideshare.net/mobile/RoyMessinger/xilinx-vs-intel-altera-fpga-performance-comparison
A piece of FPGA in console for developer to tinker with? A *cat core with FPGA on Pi-like board? Sounds good to me.