With just a few hours away from the unveiling of the next-generation Radeon graphics cards, AMD has announced that it will be acquiring FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. The latest transaction by AMD to purchase Xilinx is worth of 35 billion dollars. The new deal will extend the total available market (TAM) of AMD up to 110 billion dollars.
The new acquisition, which is expected to close by the end of 2021, will result in the combined workforce of both companies, totaling 13,000 engineers and the annual R&D investment will reach 2.7 billion dollars. The company Xilinx excels in manufacturing FPGA based products. With Xilinx onboard, AMD will be able to manufacture FPGA’s, along with the usual processors, GPU’s, Adaptive SoCs, and more. AMD and Xilinx have worked together in the past for deep learning-based projects, such as the Xilinx deep learning solutions for AMD’s EPYC server processors.
FPGA (or better known as Field Programmable Gate Array) are semiconductor products that can be instantly reconfigured on the go. FPGAs usually has its own advantages over normal processors or GPUs, when handling a specific type of workloads. We can easily guess that future releases of AMD EPYC data center processors will come with integrated FPGA technologies for enhanced AI workloads.
PRESS RELEASE
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) and Xilinx (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for AMD to acquire Xilinx in an all-stock transaction valued at $35 billion. The combination will create the industry’s leading high performance computing company, significantly expanding the breadth of AMD’s product portfolio and customer set across diverse growth markets where Xilinx is an established leader. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to AMD margins, EPS and free cash flow generation and deliver industry-leading growth.
The acquisition brings together two industry leaders with complementary product portfolios and customers. AMD will offer the industry’s strongest portfolio of high performance processor technologies, combining CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs and deep software expertise to enable leadership computing platforms for cloud, edge and end devices. Together, the combined company will capitalize on opportunities spanning some of the industry’s most important growth segments from the data center to gaming, PCs, communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and defense.
“Our acquisition of Xilinx marks the next leg in our journey to establish AMD as the industry’s high performance computing leader and partner of choice for the largest and most important technology companies in the world,” AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said. “This is truly a compelling combination that will create significant value for all stakeholders, including AMD and Xilinx shareholders who will benefit from the future growth and upside potential of the combined company. The Xilinx team is one of the strongest in the industry and we are thrilled to welcome them to the AMD family. By combining our world-class engineering teams and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing.”
“We are excited to join the AMD family. Our shared cultures of innovation, excellence and collaboration make this an ideal combination. Together, we will lead the new era of high performance and adaptive computing,” said Victor Peng, Xilinx president and CEO. “Our leading FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs, accelerator and SmartNIC solutions enable innovation from the cloud, to the edge and end devices. We empower our customers to deploy differentiated platforms to market faster, and with optimal efficiency and performance. Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our data center business and enable us to pursue a broader customer base across more markets.”
With a combined team of 13,000 talented engineers and over $2.7 billion of annual R&D investment, AMD will have additional talent and scale to deliver an even stronger set of products and domain-specific solutions.
