AMD to Acquire SeaMicro: Accelerates Disruptive Server Strategy

[Cristian_25H]

AMD today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a pioneer in energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers, for approximately $334 million, of which approximately $281 million will be paid in cash. Through the acquisition of SeaMicro, AMD will be accelerating its strategy to deliver disruptive server technology to its OEM customers serving Cloud-centric data centers. With SeaMicro's fabric technology and system-level design capabilities, AMD will be uniquely positioned to offer industry-leading server building blocks tuned for the fastest-growing workloads such as dynamic web content, social networking, search and video.

AMD's server technology combined with SeaMicro technology provides customers with a range of processor choices and platforms that can help significantly reduce data center complexity, cost and energy consumption while improving performance. AMD plans to offer the first AMD Opteron processor-based solutions that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology in the second half of 2012. The company remains firmly committed to its traditional server business, and will continue to focus and invest in this area.



"By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data center leadership position," said Rory Read, president and CEO, AMD. "SeaMicro is a pioneer in low-power server technology. The unmatched combination of AMD's processing capabilities, SeaMicro's system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing segment of the server market."

SeaMicro technologies offer substantial advantages in large data center and Cloud environments. Cloud data centers are projected to be the fastest growing segment of the server market through 2015, according to IDC. Current systems featuring SeaMicro technology typically use one quarter the power and take one sixth the space of traditional servers with the same compute performance, yet deliver up to 12 times the bandwidth per core.

Foremost among SeaMicro's innovations is their supercompute fabric, which connects thousands of processor cores, memory, storage and input/output traffic. SeaMicro's fabric supports multiple processor instruction sets. SeaMicro solutions are currently deployed in multiple sites across the world. AMD will continue to support all current SeaMicro customers while accelerating plans to deliver new platforms that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology and enable AMD's OEM partners to bring differentiated solutions to market.

"Cloud computing has brought a sea change to the data center -- dramatically altering the economics of compute by changing the workload and optimal characteristics of a server," said Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro CEO, who will become general manager of AMD's newly created Data Center Server Solutions business. "SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth. By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market."

The acquisition does not change AMD's 2012 financial guidance and the transaction is expected to be accretive to earnings after 2012. AMD will fund the cash portion of the acquisition with existing cash reserves.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Super XP]

Sounds good. This is what they need.

 

[nt300]

Current systems featuring SeaMicro technology typically use one quarter the power and take one sixth the space of traditional servers with the same compute performance, yet deliver up to 12 times the bandwidth per core.

Now this interest me very much. I wonder if they can transfer this for desktop CPUs

 

[TRxReFLeX]

yes Desktop CPU support would be very nice to see in the near future

 

[JF-AMD]

This is a server-focused technology, it is not really applicable to desktops.

 

[TRWOV]

Wait, so AMD will sell Intel based mini servers for a while? Those will make a nice collector's item.

 

[deleted]

These are those guys that make the servers with 1024 Atoms in them, right? Maybe AMD will start looking at using Bobcat in servers?

 

[JF-AMD]

Current bobcat cores do not have all of the crates that a server customer needs, like ecc, but there is opportunity to use future low power cores as well.

 

[wahdangun]

Current bobcat cores do not have all of the crates that a server customer needs, like ecc, but there is opportunity to use future low power cores as well.

so what did seamicro actually did?

 

[JF-AMD]

Can you elaborate? I don't understand your question.

 

[amd/atifiend]

most interesting.....I wonder if AMD will turn it into a success like they did with ATI...not only with GPU's but the APU's.

 

[bear jesus]

I would guess this is a long term investment that could pay off big.

Going by currently available information it seams that with each generation of GPU and APU AMD is bringing the GPU and CPU closer and closer with added standards, features and communication ability's, so with future APUs i'm sure a kind of low power usage truly hybrid CPU GPU in APU form with server standards and features could be possible.

I am thinking possibly past 2014 but it seams logical to me due to the shift towards HPC and cloud computing and as the IP acquired in this deal could be used to link up hundreds of APUs and because as far as i know no announced upcoming APU will have the server features required the APUs would be multiple generations away so much more powerful and probably at or below 22nm so relatively low power usage thus AMD could sell some kind of scalable hybrid cloud HPC cluster.

This line makes me think i could be thinking at least somewhere in the right direction "By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market." i would assume the creation of true server APUs could be considered a fundamental change.

 

[AvonX]

When you go back to work,tell those tech guys to shove that silly design that they have where...they know best.