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AMD said it is buying Xilinx for $35 billion, confirming the news leak several weeks ago. AMD made it clear that this deal is all about high performance computing (HPC): it was the headline of its announcement; it is at the top of AMD’s web site today; and it was the first thing CEO Lisa Su said (after “Good morning”) on the company’s conference call with analysts. After all the speculation about what the deal might mean, one can now be fairly confident that the main focus of AMD buying Xilinx is HPC.
EETimes’ previous analyses, after the original rumor was first published, were fairly spot-on, it seems.
The confirmation of the Xilinx acquisition was piggybacked on AMD’s regularly scheduled conference call to discuss its quarterly earnings. The company reported record revenue for the third quarter of $2.8 billion, up an even $1 billion from the like period in 2019, and up $900 million from the immediately preceding second quarter. Net income was $390 million, more than triple the $120 million logged in Q3 of 2019.
Su said increased Epyc and Ryzen sales offset lower sales in graphics. She said the company picked up new customers in the automotive, banking, and pharmaceutical industries. In the HPC segment, she touted growth in the data center market, and contracts to provided chips for supercomputers announced being built in Australia and Finland. Su said the newest version of AMD’s Epyc processor, called Milan, is being evaluated for over 100 systems. AMD is “in the middle of launching” Milan, Su said, but the company has not yet formally announced it.
AMD projects its revenue for the fourth quarter will be $3 billion, plus-or-minus $100 million. For fiscal 2020, the company believes its year-over-year revenue growth will be 41%, driven by PC, gaming, and data center products. The company reported 2019 revenue of $6.7 billion.
As for the Xilinx deal, Su said while there will continue to be strong demand for its CPUs and GPUs in HPC, the company sees growing need in that market for adaptive SoCs and FPGAs, and that is why buying Xilinx makes sense. She also mentioned the value of picking up Xilinx’s expertise in mixed-signal processing, advanced packaging, software stacks for vertical markets, and other technologies.
For the rest of this article, please see EETimes.
