AMD To Acquire Xilinx In $35 Billion Stock Deal

[CommunityMember]

You can most certainly overpay

Yes, you can, although the price for this acquisition is around the U&C premiums of the recent market capitalization of Xilinix, so while if one is on the board you can discuss the merits of the acquisition itself, once the decision was made to move forward it would not appear that AMD overpaid. Of course, some companies totally screw up acquisitions, but that is typically not due to the price itself.

[boboviz]

AMD, after LONG time, is returning in HPC market. And Xilinx acquisition is another step in this
(not considering the large experience of Xilinx in OpenCl)

[jaypatelani]

Guest Nvidia went with ada language. I think AMD can take hint from that. nim and red languages also seems good contender.

[vladpetric]

Maybe, it isn't AMD's fault that the graphics drivers contain some bugs and instead the bugs should at least partially be attributed to the programming language in which the drivers are implemented (C/C++). Someday, maybe a much better system's programming language will be invented (or an already existing one discovered) that will enable developers to create almost bug-free drivers. I feel that such a programming language is possible, but I haven't found it yet (I do not consider Rust to be such a language).

It is exactly the same PL that NVidia is using. Somehow they managed to have great drivers over the last 20 years, something that ATI/AMD did not.

[re:fi.64]

Why bother making better graphics drivers when you can spend 35 billion acquiring another company?

Yes because the entire AMD corporation is now exclusively focused on Linux GPU support. Ryzen doesn't exist, nor do any other silicon efforts. Just GPUs and their Linux support.

[Anarchy]

Maybe, it isn't AMD's fault that the graphics drivers contain some bugs and instead the bugs should at least partially be attributed to the programming language in which the drivers are implemented (C/C++). Someday, maybe a much better system's programming language will be invented (or an already existing one discovered) that will enable developers to create almost bug-free drivers. I feel that such a programming language is possible, but I haven't found it yet (I do not consider Rust to be such a language).

It's not about the bugs, but the severity of the bugs. AMD and its OEMs are still selling rdna1 cards that refuse to run without crashing for many people; if you've reached this state, you should not be attempting acquisitions, but rather you should focus on your own internal reorganisation. People need to be fired, fresh talent needs to be brought in and new processes implemented, which would allow for the release of future products that satisfy the minimum requirement that the card doesn't blackscreen your machine once a day.

[Anarchy]

Yes because the entire AMD corporation is now exclusively focused on Linux GPU support. Ryzen doesn't exist, nor do any other silicon efforts. Just GPUs and their Linux support.

If they want to get back into the HPC market and start selling accelerators and other gpgpu products they should focus on Linux support. We can shit on nvidia all day long, but their software stack on Linux is superior to whatever amd has to offer today.

[cb88]

You can most certainly overpay, because you generally have to pay a premium to the prevailing price. And stock isn't "free" as you people keep saying. You can sell it for cash. You can pledge it against loans. If its value goes down, you can do less of either of those things. And if you overpay, its value will go down.

It is free in this case, as it didn't go anywhere... the two pools of stock are just merged.

Funny how Intel and Nvidia attempted hostile takeovers of Xilinx (the largest FPGA manufacture) and they said no and mic dropped them, and AMD just waltzes up and has a friendly merger with them...

[hyperchaotic]

Why bother making better graphics drivers when you can spend 35 billion acquiring another company?

The overall story has been that since inception AMD's (well ATI's) graphics drivers were the crappiest (on windows) and on Linux only for the past 2 years were the drivers good enough yet still without any of the shitload of functionality available to windows users. Just sayin.

I don't see any connection at all between acquiring (or not) Xilinx and the quality of their Gfx drivers. They could put more work into their drivers regardless, if they wanted to. It's the "wanting to" that's the issue.

[_ONH_]

If they want to get back into the HPC market and start selling accelerators and other gpgpu products they should focus on Linux support. We can shit on nvidia all day long, but their software stack on Linux is superior to whatever amd has to offer today.

Let's talk about that again when 5.10 is out. Last I heard cuda and OpenCL don't work with 5.9 yet. KDE seems to not work on several distributions ...
And yes HW enablement is the task of the company not that of OSs dev's. but this thread is about AMD and not Nv.
I am certain AMD delivers a working package for arcturus to the HPC people.