AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx goes ahead after Chinese regulator approval

AMD has all the necessary approvals in its pocket to complete the acquisition of FPGA specialist Xilinx. The major acquisition could significantly strengthen the chip specialist’s overall competitive position.

In late 2020, AMD announced its intention to acquire Xilinx for $35 billion. With that acquisition, AMD solidifies its claim to the enterprise chip market and brings in new weapons to compete against both Intel and AMD. The acquisition has the potential to have a major impact on the entire market and was therefore subject to antitrust approval.

AMD expected to complete the acquisition in early 2022, and now the Chinese regulator has indeed given its approval. Earlier, the competent authorities of the US, UK and EU, among others, gave the go-ahead. AMD must, however, continue to provide Xilinx products to the Chinese market. On the stock exchange, investors reacted positively to the news.

FPG-wAt?

Xilinx builds so-called FPGAs(Field Programmable Arrays). These are chips consisting of a multitude of logic circuits and interconnects that users can reconfigure via firmware. This makes it possible to adapt underlying circuits to new workloads so that those workloads receive hardware support from the underlying FPGA chip.

This differs from classic chips such as GPUs from Nvidia or processors from Intel. In these, circuits and interconnects are optimized but also fixed. That makes them more efficient at the task they are built for, but flexibility is lacking.

FPGAs are popular in various sectors such as telecommunications or the automotive industry. There, the chips are configured for specific workloads, which is cheaper than developing your own chip for those workloads from scratch each time. In the data center, FPGAs are gaining popularity because you can configure them as accelerators for less traditional workloads that are not covered by GPUs or DPUs, for example.

Expansion of activities

With Xilinx under its belt, AMD can reach the entire compute-focused semiconductor market. The company itself has processors and GPUs; Xilinx’s FPGAs are of interest for just about everything that falls in between. AMD also now has the opportunity to make the FPGAs work better with its own chips as accelerators.

Nvidia presumably will not be happy. The competitor also wanted to expand its operations into the full playing field with the Arm acquisition. That acquisition, however, is meeting much more resistance and is even rumored to be on the verge of jumping off, according to rumors.