AMD is looking to add to its already impressive hardware roadmap even more, and their recent acquisition plan just got one official approval down.
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BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 06: The headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is pictured on December 6, 2020 in Beijing, China.
According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, AMD has now secured permission from the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to acquire the company Xilinx for a cool $35 billion. The transaction itself entirely involves stocks. AMD gets a 74% stake with the acquisition, while the remaining 26% will be for Xilinx shareholders.
The approval finally came through after Team Red announced its desire to bring Xilinx into their fold back in October 2020. Eventually, the U.K. CMA did their investigation into the planned acquisition back in May, with their findings turning up no reason for them to stop the deal in its tracks.
Aside from this, AMD has also submitted its plans to the European Commission, reports WCCFTech. If that approval pushes through, then Team Red will have the European Union at their disposal. By then, only a final go signal from China remains.
According to AMD, they will partner with Xilinx to invest over $2.7 billion in R&D every year to develop new products, such as CPUs, GPUs, and SoCs. FPGAs (field-programmable grid arrays) are also a part of the deal, which is notably an invention of Xilinx.
AMD is joining fierce rival NVIDIA in a race to acquire more resources to build their future tech with this planned acquisition. It’s worth noting that NVIDIA has announced its plans to acquire the British chipmaker Arm for a massive $40 billion. That deal also still hasn’t pushed through, but maybe it’s only a matter of time.
Read also: Samsung Exynos Chip with AMD GPU Exceeds iPhone 12 Pro Max in Benchmark Test
AMD And Xilinx’s Potential Merger: What’s So Good About It?
For the uninitiated, you might not even know what kind of company Xilinx is or what they’re famous for. So, why is AMD busting its tail to acquire it?
The answer is simple: diversification. Team Red wants to expand its market capabilities and develop a brand-new range of products that could penetrate markets like telco, according to Electronic Design.
For now, AMD is seeing major success with their offerings for personal computing, gaming console, and data centers. Their Ryzen chips are basically lording it over Intel right now in the PC space and gaming console market (the PS5 and Xbox Series X are both all-AMD machines), for instance. As for data centers, their line of EPYC server CPUs is fast overtaking Intel’s competing offerings as well.
Bringing Xilinx under its wing could mean that AMD will go full-blast into their telco operations, especially during this time when 5G networks have become quite common in the US and the world. Aside from that, the deal would also mean the combined companies will be valued at over $135 billion, which would rival the valuation of industry giants such as Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.
Xilinx’s expertise in the production of FPGAs could prove to be a big boon for Team Red since these chips can basically be upgraded on the fly to fit a wide array of workloads. The company’s products are also popular in wireless networks.
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Written by RJ Pierce
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