AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx has been completed. This marks the largest acquisition in the history of chip country.
AMD has completed its acquisition of Xilinx. The light for this jumped to green in late January after approval from China’s market regulator. AMD will make Xilinx a new branch in the organization: the Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group (AECG). Former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng will be in charge.
Xilinx is the inventor of the Field Programmable Gate Array or FPGA. An FPGA is a chip whose circuits you can reconfigure via firmware. From a sea of logic circuits and interconnects, you can thus optimize an FPGA via software for a specific workload. The FPGA then becomes a custom accelerator, without effectively having to develop an actual custom microchip. FPGAs are popular in specialized devices such as network hardware, but are also gaining importance in data centers. So the chips are adaptable and fit into specific devices: adaptive and embedded.
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AMD completes acquisition of Xilinx
AMD plunked down $35 billion for Xilinx. With Xilinx under its wing, AMD significantly strengthens its position against competitors Intel and Nvidia. After all, AMD now builds processors, GPUs and, thanks to Xilinx, everything in between. Nvidia wanted to expand its business to also address the full breadth of the market, but that company’s (even larger) acquisition of Arm came to nothing after protests from competition authorities worldwide.
Complementary portfolio
“The acquisition of Xilinx brings together a highly complementary set of products, customers and markets, combined with unique IP and top-tier talent,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su in a comment. “As an industry leader, Xilinx offers FPGAs, customizable SoCs, AI engines and software expertise that enables AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of performant and customizable compute solution in the industry. This allows AMD to claim a larger share of the market across cloud, edge and smart devices.”
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AMD completes acquisition of Xilinx
AMD points to three specific advantages the acquisition brings. First is differentiation into new markets. Next, R&D gets a big boost. Finally, AMD differentiates its revenues, which should strengthen its financial model. The stock market is already reacting very positively to the news.