AMD finalizes Xilinx acquisition deal

AMD first announced its intentions to acquire Xilinx back in late 2020, around the same time Nvidia started the ARM acquisition. Unlike Nvidia, however, AMD managed to obtain all the necessary green lights, especially from the Chinese government, as Team Red just finalized the acquisition of Xilinx, and this would allow the company to greatly expand its presence in the datacenter market. The first AMD products to combine Xilinx’s bleeding edge technologies are now expected to release in 2023.

Exact details on the first processors that will use Xilinx tech are not yet known, but these should at least combine AMD’s x86 cores with the Xilinx programmable engines. Apart from bolstering the datacenter presence, these new processors are supposed to also open new AMD partnerships in many diverse markets, such as aerospace, analytics, AI inference, automotive, communications, HPC and industrial IoT. Additionally, AMDs high-performance processors and graphics chips could complement the use of Xilinx FPGAs, ASICs and adaptive SoCs.

AMD CEO Lisa Su explained that Xilinx’s technologies will “enable AMD to offer the strongest portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing solutions in the industry and capture a larger share of the approximately $135 billion market opportunity we see across cloud, edge, and intelligent devices.” Interestingly enough, AMD has already been collaborating with Xilinx for some years, and this now allows them to release their first products in just one year, unlike the case with the ATI acquisition, when AMD needed half a decade to combine the graphics tech from ATI into processor iGPUs and revamped Radeon GPU lineups.

The strong ties between AMD and Xilinx become more apparent when we analyze the history of former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng. His main expertise is in GPUs, and he joined ATI in 2005, one year before the AMD acquisition. After the acquisition, he became VP of the graphics product group until 2008 when he moved to Xilinx. With the recent finalized merger, Peng will lead AMD’s Adaptive and Embedded Computing Group. This new group will obviously include AMD’s embedded business, formerly part of the enterprise and semi-custom unit.

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