UK's competition watchdog sniffs around AMD's proposed $35bn all-stock buy of Xilinx Britain’s competition regulator has belatedly stuck a probe in AMD’s $35bn all-stock proposal to purchase Xilinx, more than a month after investors in both businesses gave the transaction their seal of approval. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) today launched an enquiry inviting interested parties to provide written …
>Xilinx are a San Jose California business, wtf has it got to do with the UK competition watchdog?
Because an anti-competitive monopoly would affect UK companies
If Boeing were to try and buy Airbus it would affect people beyond Boeing in Seattle
The problem is that the threat of British disapproval and retaliatory trade action by Global-Britain (tm) doesn't strike fear in quite the same way
Softbank is trying to stifle competition by paying off regulators... Nvidia, Intel, and ARM would have more competition and they can't handle it bc as we have seen is once the playing field is level AMD stomps the competition... hopefully they will not allow the big boys to once again retain their monopolies through their power of the purse... but who knows as the corruption in the UK is wide spread
Funny thing is, Altera always was the "plucky underdog" of the FPGA business, and Xilinx the dominant company (but only around a 40/60 split of the market, not the 90/10 dominance that Intel had in CPUs). At the time we first heard of Intel buying Altera, I did suggest that Xilinx should buy AMD.
You should be more worried about AMD buying it, losing interest, and shutting it all down, and writing everything off as a loss.
Wouldn't it be great to have a micro server that could isolate your critical workloads with all this side channel hell we have been living in since Specter and Heartbleed and Rowhammer? Remember Seamicro? Remember how you can't buy that thing now because AMD bought it, killed all Intel support, and then shut the whole thing down the AMD only versions weren't pushing enough volume to pay for the debt they took on buying it?
So yeah, maybe there are good reasons to take a second look, as this marriage doesn't come with a prenup, and the last wedding ended up with a cold stiff in a pine box.
Your logic is a bit flawed.
The use of FPGA's is accelerating as they do well much better at dedicated tasks than general purpose CPU's. Where making an ASIC is prohibitively expensive, but the speed of a dedicated chip is required, FPGA's are the money shot. They have become so embedded in the aerospace industry that they come with their own general purpose CPU IP cores these days.
AMD wanted another channel for selling CPU cores so this is marriage of FPGA-CPU is perfect for them.
The fear I have is founded on the fact that while healthy on it's own, the FPGA market is TINY compared to the broader CPU/GPU/RAM/flash markets right? So if AMD winds up behind the curve again, following the same cycles we've seen over and over again, I am afraid they may start cutting stuff. If it got spun out like Spansion and then GlobalFoundries, that's not necessarily the end of the world.
Also AMD has some prior form executing M&As successfully. Then again, the Centaur and ATI acquisitions threw them off track for several years while ultimately being successful, and several others like SeaMicro were closed and written off as a loss.
I feel like ATI gained more than AMD in the merger, and while GPUs are killing it in the world where number crunching matters, the CPU/GPU combos really haven't set the world on fire.
What do you think the prospects of a AMD cpu/FPGA combo or CPU/GPU/FPGA combo are in the real world? I'm interested, as my gut leans to thinking that the best standalone parts combined will outperform and outsell an integrated unit. I also feel like that is a biased opinion on my part, and based on too little experience with ASICs and FPGAs with on die interconnects. At least in principal you could really push some data around that way, cutting out that long trip down the PCIe bus
and back.
If AMD buys Xilinx, and NVidia gets approval to buy Arm, at that point NVidia only has to buy up Lattice and we'll have three major companies producing CPUs, GPUs and FGPAs.
That can be both a terrific or a terrible thing, depending on your perspective. Regardless, AMD buying Xilinx seems like a done deal, after Altera's acquisition by Intel. After the proclamations by AMD back in the K8/K10 days about running FPGAs in sockets alongside server CPUs which never really became a thing, this might lead to a revival of that concept.
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