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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 27 2020, @09:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the big-deal dept.

AMD in $35 Billion All-Stock Acquisition of Xilinx

After a couple of weeks of rumor, as well as a couple of years of hearsay, AMD has gone feet first into a full acquisition of FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. The deal involves an all-stock transaction, leveraging AMD's sizeable share price in order to enable an equivalent $143 per Xilinx share – current AMD stockholders will still own 74% of the combined company, while Xilinx stockholders will own 26%. The combined $135 billion entity will total 13000 engineers, and expand AMD's total addressable market to $110 Billion. It is believed that the key reasons for the acquisition lie in Xilinx's adaptive computing solutions for the data center market.

[...] As part of the acquisition, Victor Peng will join AMD as president responsible for the Xilinx business, and at least two Xilinx directors will join the AMD Board of Directors upon closing.

Part of the enablement of the acquisition is AMD leveraging its market capitalization of ~$100 billion, and a lot of the industry will draw parallels of Intel's acquisition of FPGA-manufacturer Altera in December 2015 for $16.7 billion. The high-performance FPGA markets, as well as SmartNICs, adaptive SoCs, and other controllable logic, reside naturally in the data center markets more than most other markets. With AMD's recent growth in the enterprise space with its Zen-based EPYC processor lines, a natural evolution one might conclude would be synergizing high-performance compute with adaptable logic under one roof, which is precisely the conclusion that Intel also came to several years ago. AMD reported last quarter that it had broken above the 10% market share in Enterprise with its EPYC product lines, and today's earnings call is also expected to see growth. AMD is already reporting revenue up +56% year on year company-wide, with +116% in the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom markets.

Also at The Register, Phoronix, and Wccftech.

Previously: AMD Negotiating to Acquire Xilinx


Original Submission

Related Stories

AMD Negotiating to Acquire Xilinx 4 comments

AMD Is Gearing up To Acquire Xilinx (XLNX) for $30 Billion

AMD, a major player in the semiconductor sphere, is gearing up to acquire Xilinx for $30 billion, thereby, providing an impetus to the ongoing consolidation wave in the industry.

According to the sources quoted by [The] Wall Street Journal, AMD and Xilinx are currently in an advanced stage of negotiation, with a potential deal emerging as early as next week.

Bear in mind that Xilinx manufactures programmable chips for wireless networks and its acquisition will provide AMD a solid foothold in an industry that is currently in flux. With carriers injecting billions of dollars in the telecommunication sphere in order to expand the coverage of the next-gen 5G wireless network, Xilinx has become an important node in this endeavor.

However, the deal may be rejected:

The details of the deal revealed yesterday suggest that AMD is interested in paying up to $20 billion for acquiring Xilinx. This marks a roughly 20% premium over the acquisition target's closing share price yesterday. Xilinx is responsible for manufacturing communications and processing products, and it specializes in semiconductors dubbed as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). These differ from application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs, such as a microprocessor) by allowing use-customization after manufacturing.

Following the revelation, analysts from Citi Group, Wedbush, Citigroup and CNBC have pitched in their opinions about the affair. The majority of the analysts are skeptical of the deal's outcome as they either believe that no synergies exist between AMD and Xilinx, or that Xilinx management will likely reject the deal.

The Radeon designer's primary objective behind the move is likely to be the intention of competing with Intel Corporation in the FPGA sector. Due to the nature of FPGAs, they are often found in a large array of tech products. Such products cover applications such as neural networks, aerospace, automotive, finance, data centers and wireless and wired communications.

Also at Phoronix.

Related: Xilinx 7nm FPGA SoC
Xilinx Alveo U280 Launched, Possibly with AMD EPYC CCIX Support


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by corey on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:20PM (2 children)

    by corey (2202) on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:20PM (#1069525)
    Well, Intel recently bought Altera, the other big name in the FPGA manufacturer market. Now AMD can be the same. I just spent this morning getting my sub-4yr old kids to share playing with balloons, had to make sure they each had one. Hmm.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:47PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday October 27 2020, @10:47PM (#1069537) Journal

      I just hope the balloon AMD is holding doesn't pop.

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      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:40AM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday October 28 2020, @01:40AM (#1069652)

        Between Altera and Xilinx, Xilinx has been the FPGA of choice on every project I've been involved with using an FPGA in over the last 22 years. Usually they have a clear advantage in circuit density, bandwidth, power, and price. Onboard ARMs are a nice touch too. Like Apple, Altera seemed to be promoting itself in the schools, but since then they just haven't been competitive.

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  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:32PM (1 child)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:32PM (#1069566)

    That thinks these mergers are good for the consumer? (e.g. the poor folks not in the 99%)

    First the steel industry (Ok, maybe a bad example but I'm tired and hungry ready for dinner). Then the oil industry. I'm sure I'm missing a lot in between but my point is, when these mergers happen A) people lose jobs; B) consumer prices rise; and C) power consolodates (Verizon, Disney, Comcast, etc etc etc)

    Seriously, we have what, 3 mega-billionares controlling 90% of ourTV channels? Who the fuck thought that was a good idea (Clinton), and who the fuck let that happen (Bush)?

    I'm glad I'm old and on SSI with no kids so I don't have to care like I used to, but jeez. Shit is much worse that I ever thought it would be 20 years ago.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @04:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @04:09PM (#1069937)

      these are the good old days.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:39PM (#1069575)

    or 2 goods make a great?

    It's not yet clear if Intel buying Altera was a good or bad idea.
    Now we have done the cpu+fpag merger twice.
      (No doubt good for m&a folks and execs, but questionable so far if it added or subtracted from either company's ability to make great stuff.)

    AMD, I guess has to follow suit because this year that seems to be table stakes for being a computing center cpu provider.

    Next year could confirm this as a good move.
        or show that neither company can find value in the meld.

    Best case, we at least still have the four great product lines un-broken, and they figure out something where inside sharing helps.
    Worst case, the cpu or fpga side gets control and breaks their new sibling.

  • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:52PM (4 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Tuesday October 27 2020, @11:52PM (#1069590) Journal

    Most probably, the main reason is not FPGA as such, but existing 5g RFSoC:

    https://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/soc/rfsoc.html [xilinx.com]

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @12:47AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @12:47AM (#1069628)

      What? Fuck no! Then which CPUs will I buy in a few years when all the dust has settled?

      Intel keeps tacking on more complexity that is totally assured not to somehow backfire in the future like their speculative execution tech...
      ARM is now owned by NVIDIA so they'll probably add some DRM or other antifeature to new designs.
      AMD apparently wants to put 5G on the CPU SoC? But muh privacy!

      Maybe time to buy Apple? Oh wait...

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @12:56AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2020, @12:56AM (#1069632)

        AMD apparently wants to put 5G on the CPU SoC? But muh privacy!

        Says who?

        • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday October 28 2020, @06:47AM

          by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 28 2020, @06:47AM (#1069773)

          Can't say: it's private.

    • (Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday October 28 2020, @11:29PM

      by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Wednesday October 28 2020, @11:29PM (#1070156) Journal

      Not sure that part would work well in the handset market where, because of the large volumes, FPGAs would be at a significant disadvantage to an ASIC implementation because of cost and also power consumption.

      5G has always struck me as sort of a scam anyhow-- how does all that technology translate into an improvement in the user experience? Your brain has an inherent input bandwidth limitation, and we must be getting close to hitting it if we haven't already

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