[BryanBeshore]

Lisa Su is a fantastic CEO. Time will tell what the impact of AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx will be (should it close), but this shows the strategy and execution behind Su and team.

While a lot of acquisitions don’t pan out, this seems great.

[DCKing]

They're going to need good leadership to pull this off. AMD doesn't have a great track record when it comes to these integrations.

AMD bought ATI while promising the same integration "synergies". GPU style compute was going to be completely woven into the CPU - "AMD Fusion". Sounds great - but they ended up with them being beaten to the CPU-with-integrated-GPU market by Intel by over a year (Intel Clarkdale launched January 2010, AMD Llano midway 2011). 14 years after the acquisition, AMD's iGPU integration is not much different compared to any other iGPU integration, their raw performance lead is shrinking compared to Intel and they're beaten by Apple. Radeon Technologies Group functionally operates independently within the company, and AMD won't use their more performant new RDNA architecture in iGPUs for two years after its launch for some reason - even their 2021 APUs still use their 2017 Vega architecture (fundamentally based on 2012 GCN technology). In the intervening years they've screwed up their processor architecture and marketshare for by going all in on the terrible Bulldozer architecture that was designed around the broken promises of far reaching GPU integration.

Given all that the ATI acquisition might still have been worth it - in hindsight AMD needed a competent GPU architecture one way or another - but the mismanagement of this acquistion nearly killed the company. I hope better leadership can do something here but I'm not really holding my breath.

[atq2119]

Agreed. Now to be fair, the acquisition is also what helped the company survive because it got them the console business. So it's not like it was completely botched.

They screwed up majorly with software, and they may have the same problem with an FPGA acquisition as well. AMD failed big time to capitalize on GPUs the way Nvidia did, and that's really almost entirely down to lack of good software solutions. There's ROCm now and it seems plausible that the gap is going to narrow further with AMD GPUs deployed to big HPC clusters, but a gap remains.

[m4rtink]

Aren't all the new desktop consoles and the generation before that based on AMD CPU and GPU fused together in a specific way ?

[wtallis]

The consoles use AMD SoCs that include CPU and GPU cores, but there's nothing special about how the CPU and GPU are connected. The only remotely unusual aspect there is that many of the console SoCs connect GDDR5/6 to the SoC's shared memory controller, while other consumer devices using similar chips (marketed by AMD as APUs) tend to use DDR4 or LPDDR.

[parsimo2010]

AMD purchasing Xilinx is a reaction to Intel purchasing Altera five years ago. Dr. Su might be a good CEO for other reasons, but this isn't something that illustrates brilliant strategy on her part.

[ATsch]

I think it's more a reaction to the decreasing importance of CPUs in the datacenter in favor of interconnect technology. FPGAs are one of the directions in which the "smart nic" or "DPU" tech has been moving, which is critical to the trend of datacenter disaggregation. Xilinx has a very strong offering in that regard.

[baybal2]

It is not a trend at all if you look at market data.

Prime majority of hosting market still goes to bog standard servers, not even blades.

I'll wait for "clouds" to get to significant double double digit market share first.

[ATsch]

If you look at market data, you can see that this market did not exist a few years ago and is now estimated to be worth billions, with major players releasing products in the space. Unless the dynamics pushing this forward change overnight, I think it's pretty safe to call it a trend.

[sitkack]

This is AMD competing with Nvidia, not AMD competing with Intel.

[rusticpenn]

Intel did not produce anything worthwhile from that strategy yet and I have seen no plans either. I use Altera for all my FPGA needs.

[ATsch]

A large reason for the deal with Altera was that Altera already used intel for fabrication. I understand Intel's 10nm and 7nm failure has hurt them a lot in that regard, quite the opposite of the expected synergy. Unlike Xilinx for AMD, they didn't really have any other technologies intel needed either, the biggest advantage was fabrication and that fell through.

[GeorgeTirebiter]

Xilinx had laid off a good chunk right before their sale to AMD. Xilinx was having some financial troubles; when that happens, investors want out before a company craters. So selling themselves was one possible solution.

[cptskippy]

The industry doesn't move overnight. AMD might have seen where Intel was going and didn't want to be caught off guard, or that might be the alternative to Apple approach of dozens of coprocessors on a chip.

[BryanBeshore]

As I said, time will tell