AMD Makes HPC Play With Xilinx Deal

October 27, 2020

Chipmaker to buy the FPGA vendor for $35B as processor market continues to consolidate

By Jeffrey Burt

AMD is buying programmable chipmaker Xilinx in a $35 billion deal that will boost its capabilities in the high-performance computing (HPC) space and further drive an ongoing realignment in the data center processor space.

The Impact: The deal comes at a time of rapid consolidation and change in the processor industry. For the past couple of decades, that market has primarily been the domain of Intel, which has owned more than 80% of it. However, the company has stumbled in recent years — for example, with production delays that caused it to fall behind AMD and others in offering 7-nanometer processors. Intel took a financial hit last week when it reported softening demand in its data center business, which accounts for about a third of its revenue.

At the same time, the competition has ramped up as workloads have evolved and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and new computing models like the cloud and the edge have emerged. AMD, which had been a non-factor for a decade, has remade itself in large part through the development of the Zen microarchitecture and its EPYC data center chips and Ryzen client processors.

Unlike CPUs, FPGAs can be reprogrammed, which is important in such environments as HPC and cloud and with AI-based workloads. FPGAs, like GPUs, also can be used as accelerators to complement CPUs in running data center workloads.

Meanwhile, Nvidia – which, like AMD and Intel, offers GPUs that have become key components in HPC and enterprise data center servers – is in the process of spending $40 billion to buy Arm, the chip designer whose low-power (SoC) architecture can be found in most smartphones and other mobile devices and now is growing in data center systems, including HPC and supercomputers. The move will create another processor powerhouse that will better challenge Intel.

There also are other architectures, like RISC-V, to challenge Intel’s and AMD’s x86-based chips, and there’s a growing list of smaller companies like Ampere, which makes Arm-based chips and is led by former Intel executives. In addition, companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) – with its Graviton chips – also are developing their own processors.

For channel partners, these changes in the processor market are giving them what they’ve been seeking for years: a broader range of options beyond Intel to offer their end customers.