Tuesday, May 11th 2021
UK Competition Regulator Probes AMD's Buyout of Xilinx
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."
Source:
The Register
26 Comments on UK Competition Regulator Probes AMD's Buyout of Xilinx
AMD needs an R&D fab that they can make their own samples with. This company has it's own fab facilities. It doesn't take a genius to figure such out. So, UK gov? What mental giants do you have calling the shots on this one, eh?
It's not like AMD buying them out locks up the market because there are still other companies like Altera, Intel, Microsemi, latTic, Achronix that competitors to AMD can use.
- As has been mentioned this happens a lot when large market dominant companies make acquisitions, especially when buying a very large player in a related space (Xilinx is the largest FPGA vendor in the world by marketshare).
- The UK is not the only country which will be doing this - plenty of other regulators will perform the same due diligence for this acquisition and others. You just don't tend to hear about it in the news.
- If the UK did have a problem with it then one of a number things could happen - the deal could be stopped, safeguards and guarantees in the agreement could be put in place to avoid abuse in the market, or the two companies could have to operate semi-independently when it comes to the UK market. The UK does have leverage when it comes to any business who wants to have access to the UK market.
- Xilinx is the largest FPGA vendor in the world, and just like the Nvidia/ARM deal they need to make sure it won't end up reducing the number of competitors in the space, driving up prices, as well as ensuring AMD couldn't hike prices of Xilinx chips to AMD's competitors, again reducing competitiveness and driving up prices for everyone.
Tl;dr - this happens all the time for deals of this size in many, many countries and ensures that large businesses don't buy other companies purely as a way to damage competitors who rely on the acquired companies to do business.We've nearly sold everything so I see no reason to stop this sale going ahead :)Money talks :)
1. Tea
2. How to get foreign labor, money and resources while drinking tea.
teain the west o_OIt is a different beverage - I doubt they drink it for the theophylline rush like we do...