After three years of continuous growth in the processor market and increasing their market share on all computing products they provide, AMD is rumored to be in talks of buying Xilinx, an important player in the FPGA and AI accelerator market.
No confirmation yet
High-performance computing giant AMD is said to be in talks to acquire Xilinx, one of the big players in the field of FPGA and other kinds of hardware accelerators. Xilinx produces programmable system-on-chip (SoC), field-programmable grid arrays, and their adaptive computing acceleration platform (ACAP). Their products are extensively used in data centers, wired and wireless communications, the automotive industry, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.
As a big player in the data center accelerators and processors, AMD currently expected to release its third generation of EPYC processors, which would steal more market share away from their main competitor Intel. However, whereas Intel is falling behind AMD on per-socket performance, their buyout of Altera, a company specializes in server accelerator technologies and a competitor to Xilinx, would provide them with a better ground for upcoming products in the data center market.
Comparison of the market caps
Seeing the opportunity and with a desire to expand their portfolio beyond the classical x86 server business, AMD might have thought about buying Xilinx and adding their strength to their products, providing programmable and fixed-function accelerating capabilities for their datacentre products in the future.
Whereas these rumors fall in line perfectly with the industry’s general direction, there is still no confirmation or denial about the buyout talks. Looking at their market cap AMD is around $100B and Xilinx is sitting around $30B. If a deal would go through, AMD might opt to use their stock to pay Xilinx shareholders. AMD also bought graphics processor manufacturer ATI in 2009 and ever since the company is competing in two tech giants on two separate fronts: with Intel on consumer and datacentre processors, and with Nvidia on data center accelerators and graphics cards.
While there is no confirmation for rumors from either side of the alleged talks, AMD is expected to hold an earnings call concerning the third quarter of 2020 at the end of October where they may comment on the news.