AMD In Advanced Talks To Buy Xilinx (cnbc.com) 49
According to The Wall Street Journal, AMD is in advanced talks to buy rival chip maker Xilinx Inc. for more than $30 billion. Slashdot reader Jerrry writes: "Looks like further consolidation in the chip industry is in order if this merger goes through..." CNBC reports: A deal, which could mark the latest big tie-up in the rapidly consolidating semiconductor industry, can come together as soon as next week, [The Wall Street Journal reported]. AMD has seen a higher usage of its products recently, driven in part by an overall surge in chip demand due to a global shift to work from home, and market-share gains from larger rival Intel.
San Jose, California-based Xilinx makes programmable chips used in data centers to speed up tasks such as artificial intelligence work and in 5G telecommunications base stations. The company's business suffered a setback last year when key customer Huawei Technologies Ltd was blacklisted by U.S. officials, preventing it from buying chips from U.S. companies. Government officials have since added other China-based companies, including some Xilinx customers, to the list.
San Jose, California-based Xilinx makes programmable chips used in data centers to speed up tasks such as artificial intelligence work and in 5G telecommunications base stations. The company's business suffered a setback last year when key customer Huawei Technologies Ltd was blacklisted by U.S. officials, preventing it from buying chips from U.S. companies. Government officials have since added other China-based companies, including some Xilinx customers, to the list.
New rivalry! (Score:3)
So it will be AMDinx against Inteltera!
This would be a big deal. XIlinx is the 900lb gorilla of the FPGA world and has some pretty cool technology.
Advance dance,sometimes u lead,sometimes u follow (Score:2)
Versus, of course, when AMD and Xilinx were engaged in incipient talks, and the dream of decreasing the industry chip market diversity was but a faint hope.
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1. Nobody downvoted you. You post at zero. If you want to know why, check here. [slashdot.org]
2. Among other things, Xilinx invented the FPGA. Turn in your nerd card on your way out.
Re: How were they competing? Never heard of Xilinx (Score:2)
1. Zero means it got downmodded. Normal logged-in score is 1.
2. Then say that! Instead of downmodding like a Reddit coward!
Seriously, Slashdot works exactly the wrong way around. You should ONLY be alowed to censor ("moderate") when giving a reason in form of a reply. One that can be replied to, so assholes can be called out on their assholery. Otherwise only anonymous cowards can "moderate".
Re:How were they competing? Never heard of Xilinx (Score:5, Funny)
downvoting my post because I've never heard of Xilinx?
If you have never heard of Xilinx, you aren't qualified to be posting in this thread. Xilinx invented FPGAs. They are the 800-lb gorilla of programmable logic.
If you had never heard of Microsoft, your opinions on desktop software would be dismissed.
If you had never heard of Amazon, your opinions on online retailing would be dismissed.
This is no different.
I said it doesn't look like they're competing directly with AMD
Acquisitions are not supposed to be about eliminating competition. They are supposed to be about vertical or horizontal integration. This is the latter.
FPGAs may become common in cloud servers, with a combination of a powerful CPU with FPGA fabric that can handle massively parallel customized computing for AI, crypto, simulations, rendering, etc.
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"If you have never heard of Xilinx, you aren't qualified to be posting in this thread. Xilinx invented FPGAs. They are the 800-lb gorilla of programmable logic.
If you had never heard of Microsoft, your opinions on desktop software would be dismissed.
If you had never heard of Amazon, your opinions on online retailing would be dismissed."
If you haven't heard of all three maybe you aren't in the right place. I just assume anybody lingering around here has tinkered with an FPGA by this point if for no other rea
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Xilinx invented FPGAs. FPGAs are chips that feature a large amount of programmable logic blocks. The advantage is that they can be a lot, lot faster than a CPU for some tasks.
A modern example is the Apple Afterburner card which is used for video encoding and decoding. It contains an FPGA rather than a fixed-function chip, so it can be updated or repurposed for other tasks.
Intel bought Altera, another FPGA company, a while back. FPGA technology looks like it will be the next big thing for high performance co
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I just thought of something. With Apple switching to their own "silicon" (CPU/GPU), what if they take that opportunity to also add FPGA to their IC? Imagine all ARM Macs having "mini Afterburner" capabilities built-in. Maybe it could also help with things like x86 emulation for some complex opcodes? (AVX for ex
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Maybe but they would need to buy the technology in from someone else. Also FPGAs are relatively expensive compared to more general purpose options and the GPU is basically free because you need one for graphics anyway.
They will need to rely heavily on acceleration because their CPUs won't be competitive with x86 on performance so maybe...
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I can say I've never, ever seen the name "Xilinx", and I read "tech news sites" pretty often.
downvoting my post because I've never heard of Xilinx?
If I had mod points, I would mod you +1 Funny for that.
Re: How were they competing? Never heard of Xilinx (Score:2)
I'd mod him +1 'Courage'. It's an honest admission and an honest question
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Probably because Intel bought Altera, which was a competitor for Xilinx. Makes me wonder if Intel and AMD have something interesting in store because there is almost no overlap when it comes to a CPU vs an FPGA. They both do very different tasks.
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Maybe it's their way to get back into the embedded electronics market, which they totally missed. As you say, there is very little overap between an FPGA and a CPU - however, there's quite an overlap between a CPU and a SoC, and both Altera and Xilinx make SoC.
In the past few years all major FPGA companies have been bought by bigger companies. Actel has been bought by Microchip, Altera by Intel and now Xilinx by AMD.
Re:How were they competing? Never heard of Xilinx (Score:4, Interesting)
I think they rather aim at the cloud market than embedded electronics, AWS already offers an in-house FPGA solution [1] and that's where the real money is.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ins... [amazon.com]
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It doesn't seem like their business was really competing with AMD directly, just offering solutions that AMD doesn't.
Who says they have to compete? Maybe they're just a profitable business?
Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I can say I've never, ever seen the name "Xilinx", and I read "tech news sites" pretty often.
Me? I wouldn't have admitted that in public.
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And very relevant here:
Lattis got into the FPGA business by buying AMDs PLD divison, then called Vantis in 1999 (AMD had been in the PLD business since the 1970s).
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You forgot Microsemi (formerly Actel) and QuickLogic.
(Thanks Google!)
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Maybe before making a statement about never having heard of a company, you might do a quick search for them. No college student from the last 2 decades working on chip development hasn't heard of Xilinx. I've been spotting their chips on various tech boards for decades (Cisco, HP, to name a few no-namers).
You read "tech news sites", but missed them in the NASDAQ 100 or S&P 500? Might change up those "tech news sites" a bit, 'cuz you're a bit behind... a several decades.
Even a little read-up on Wikipe
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You are wrong in having never heard of Xilinx. Perhaps you read consumer 'tech' sites often but if you've ever geeked out and played with FPGA programming for fun or profit then you likely own one of their FPGAs. If you haven't screwed around with at least a $30/FPGA for fun and made an LED blink or something maybe you aren't in the right place at all.
As for your other post about moderation. You haven't been downmod HERE but you've a few unfair COVID smash mods you've mostly got terrible Karma because your
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I've never used an FPGA* (as in, dev board/programming) but I've used a lot of microcontrollers. Z80, PIC, ATtiny, ATmega. Can I keep my nerd card, pretty please?
* I still already knew about Altera, Lattice and Xilinx, though.
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Depends... is it on your list of stuff you haven't gotten around to?
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Maybe I'm totally wrong, but I can say I've never, ever seen the name "Xilinx", and I read "tech news sites" pretty often.
That's lame. I was using Xilinx chips over 30 years ago.
Back then, their logic design software was utterly useless and you had to program every individual gate and interconnect by hand to get anything real done. That was a lot of fun, kind of like solving a giant sudoku. Even so, I could rarely figure out how to utilize the logic units near the center of the chips; it was just too hard to route signals in that far given the constraints. I presume that by now they've fixed those issues and the software autom
How do these leak? (Score:2)
Seems like all these mega mergers always leak somehow. So much for keeping a secret. Does it happen deliberately? Maybe Xilinx could get new last minute bids to jack up their price (how many people can pay $30 bil?) ? If someone knows a reason not to do the deal, they'd say something? What other theories on why and who leaks these?
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kinda sorta (Score:4, Informative)
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Easy - the more people involved in an activity, the more chance someone will spill the beans. AMD and Xilinx are not small companies - they have thousands of people who would even
Since Intel bought Altera... (Score:3)
...no surprise that AMD tries to buy Xilinx.
(The Altera and Xilinx are the equivalent of Intel and AMD in the programmable logic space e.q. FPGA.)
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You mean Altera is flawed and expensive and Xilinx is powerful and reasonably priced?
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You mean Altera is flawed and expensive and Xilinx is powerful and reasonably priced?
Ha! No, just meant that Intel and AMD are top players in CPU space while Xilinx and Altera are in the FPGA space. And since Intel bought Altera, AMD probably also wants to fortify itself in this space. I suspect both are eyeing the AI with this move?
Love my AMD (Score:1)
Re: I Love my AMD (Score:1)
Now that's interesting (Score:2)
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Interesting times indeed.
Intel acquired Altera.
AMD is acquiring Xilinx.
nVidia is acquiring ARM.
Apple acquired P.A. Semi and are switching to their own ARM-based ICs.
That's two x86-based giants and two ARM-based giants. Do you think it would it be totally impossible to see Intel+AMD and Apple+nVidia mergers in the future, i.e. decades from now? Followed by a final x86 vs ARM showdown?
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Forgot to add that Intel are finally taking graphics seriously, so all four of them have both CPU and GPU capabilities and do not depend on another company to make complete systems.
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As for x86 vs ARM - x86 "won" the PC market not because it was technically superior architecture, but because of the IBM-PC standard. A whole ecosystem of interchangeable parts and software formed around this (unofficial at the beginning) standard.
For ARM to do the same, it will need a similar standard that defines boot process, interconnects, minimal set of hardware components, etc. This is in fact the only thing sto
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ARM has their 'Server Base Boot Requirement' for server systems to boot from UEFI but, as you point out, their client situation is crazy fragmented.
Early adoption of UEFI by the RISC-V community (on RISC-V GitHub page & initial support landing in Linux kernel 5.10) will be very interesting to watch, particularly later this month when SiFive demos the first 'RISC-V PC'.
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Re: Consolidation (Score:2)
The hard cores in all commercially available FPGAs are still ARM. I'd heard rumours that Intel was going to build a chip with an x86 core and FPGA fabric, but I don't know if it happened.
My guess is there's no compelling reason to have a super-high performance CPU core in an FPGA. The cores generally just do control-plane work and all the performance-critical processing is done in the FPGA fabric or dedicated hard cores like video encoders, encryption blocks, etc.
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There are industrial application where combing a CPU and FPGA is beneficial. Coms are one. Radar, electronic defense systems are another. The CPU is dealing with more complex algorithms like protocols while the FPGA is better with processing vast amount of data (say DSP like FFT or filtering).
Is this for programmable neural net chiplets? (Score:2)
FPGAs seem close enough to something very useful as a basis for designing hardware specifically for big nets of matrix multipliers or even proper neuron simulations with all the bells and whistles right in the silicon at no slowdown costs.
I mean the "everything can be connected to everything" part.
Re: Is this for programmable neural net chiplets? (Score:3)
That's one use-case. Xilinx has chips specifically dedicated to machine-learning/AI such as their Versal AI cores. [xilinx.com]
I used to work in embedded software at a hardware/software design contracting house and I think almost all of their designs used at least one FPGA. They're the best solution for when you need a custom digital chip but can't afford an actual custom chip.