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AMD buying Xilinx is interesting. Some people say the real point was to get SolarFlare, a maker of super-fast NICs built around Xilinx FPGAs, and itself recent
by ncmncm 4y ago
AMD buying Xilinx is interesting.
Some people say the real point was to get SolarFlare, a maker of super-fast NICs built around Xilinx FPGAs, and itself recently bought by Xilinx. I have not heard of anybody expecting to see FPGAs on EPYC server CPUs. I guess you could imagine them appearing in a Radeon card. Could a collection of shaders be usefully transposed into an FPGA, automatically?
Why did Xilinx buy SolarFlare? Maybe because the markup on fancy NICs is better than on FPGAs. Or maybe because SolarFlare engineers are better than most at getting the best out of their FPGA.
Intel bought out Altera, and (at least for a little while) offered CPU chips with some soft logic onboard. I don't know if anything ever came of that. I have not heard of any, lately.
FPGAs, where you have one, are of course the best place to implement new encryption algorithms, as clumsily hinted at in the article.
NVidia bought Mellanox, a fancy NIC company. Was it just for their FPGA engineers? What use could they have for NIC design expertise?
It is hard to make sense of these acquisitions. Guessing seems unlikely to hit on real reasons.
- teleforce 4y agoIt's not only interesting, it's inevitable. The writing is on the wall after Intel acquired Altera. Actually just several weeks before Intel announcement of Altera acquisition, me and my friend who has worked with Intel before were discussing when the inevitable will happen, i.e. Intel buys Altera. Intel is the client of Altera and vice versa, for a long time. Intel also has agreement with AMD, if any their staff members wanted to quit they cannot go to work directly under their direct competitors immediately after they quit (from Intel joins AMD, and vice versa.) So what any smart Intel engineers would do is to join Altera when they quit Intel. The acquisition is really inevitable because it makes perfect sense from the business, technology and human resources point of view.
- ncmncm 4y agoNone of this explains what value AMD or Intel get from the buyouts.
- teleforce 4y agoNot sure exactly what value you meant here, I've already mentioned that they (Intel and Altera) are customer of each other, and getting one of the critical supply chain elements under your company is a big plus. Also Intel senior engineers have been using Altera as stepping stone since forever, and to remove one of your competitors that frequently sucks out your experience engineers in a highly specialized field of chip design is totally worth it. But hey, as they always said not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
- ncmncm 4y agoIntel has not shown much evidence of worry about losing staff, and anyway Altera was only a little net. And, it doesn't explain AMD's or NVidia's purchases.
- teleforce 4y agoIntel's bosses are most probably losing sleeps on the limited talents available especially the more experienced engineers, and the lack of talents trend is pervasive in the electronics industry: Where Are the Microelectronics Engineers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32012660