AMD Completes Its Acquisition Of Xilinx

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Completes Its Acquisition Of Xilinx

As was expected with last week AMD receiving all necessary regulatory approvals for its acquisition of Xilinx, today the deal successfully closed...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Completes-Xilinx-Deal

[Peter Fodrek]

Welcome for Queen Lisa I

President
CEO
a from now char[wo]man of the board, as well

There is only person that served for all three position at one moment in AMD history :
Walter Jeremiah (Jerry) Sanders III

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Sanders_(businessman)

[L_A_G]

The whole acquisition has always come off as something they've done just in case Intel's acquisition of Altera back in 2015 actually produces some game changing products. All that's seemingly changed is that Altera FPGAs are now made in Intel's foundries, but they're still just making more advanced versions of the products they were making before the acquisition. Even the parts that combine a general purpose SoC with programmable logic are still ARM-based and Xilix is still way ahead in that market.

Come to think of it; What have the Altera engineers been up to since Intel bought them? They haven't really leveraged Intel's tech beyond process technology to create new products (also known as "synergies" in management lingo) like a lot of people suspected. Is the new Bitcoin mining FPGA and the division built around it and future products of the type where all the engineers have gone?

[numacross]

All that's seemingly changed is that Altera FPGAs are now made in Intel's foundries

Altera was using Intel foundries at least 2.5 year before the acquisition.

but they're still just making more advanced versions of the products they were making before the acquisition. Even the parts that combine a general purpose SoC with programmable logic are still ARM-based and Xilix is still way ahead in that market.

Come to think of it; What have the Altera engineers been up to since Intel bought them? They haven't really leveraged Intel's tech beyond process technology to create new products (also known as "synergies" in management lingo) like a lot of people suspected. Is the new Bitcoin mining FPGA and the division built around it and future products of the type where all the engineers have gone?

They have released a hybrid Xeon-FPGA chip in 2018. It could be seen as a test run for EMIB with the end goal being a very complex design on the level of Ponte Vecchio, which was show with 47 tiles. It would be quite easy to release versions of this with FPGA tiles, but maybe that would be too similar to what the Agilex line is already.
I think most of Altera's technology goes into non-mainstream and custom designs. Intel does a lot of stuff that's not really widely talked about. Maybe we'll see it in the dreaded pay-as-you-go CPU sales model that Intel's shareholders dream about?

[coder]

The whole acquisition has always come off as something they've done just in case Intel's acquisition of Altera back in 2015 actually produces some game changing products.

Intel did announce Xeon CPUs with integrated FPGA chips, but they either never reached the market or remained a custom product for certain big customers.

Come to think of it; What have the Altera engineers been up to since Intel bought them?

Maybe some of their more innovative products were cancelled due to Intel's manufacturing problems? That certainly stalled Intel's innovation on the CPU front (i.e. in desktops & servers), because they had several designs which were tied to manufacturing processes that weren't viable for those markets.

BTW, Intel does support their OpenVINO deep learning software stack on some of Altera's FPGAs. That's definitely a synergy, but I see it as more of a stop-gap measure until Habana can get a good foothold in the market with their purpose-built ASICs.

[L_A_G]

Altera was using Intel foundries at least 2.5 year before the acquisition.

So there's not even that... I remember they were using TSMC the same way Xilinx was/is.

They have released a hybrid Xeon-FPGA chip in 2018. It could be seen as a test run for EMIB with the end goal being a very complex design on the level of Ponte Vecchio, which was show with 47 tiles. It would be quite easy to release versions of this with FPGA tiles, but maybe that would be too similar to what the Agilex line is already.
I think most of Altera's technology goes into non-mainstream and custom designs. Intel does a lot of stuff that's not really widely talked about. Maybe we'll see it in the dreaded pay-as-you-go CPU sales model that Intel's shareholders dream about?

Oh those things! When I started typing the post I thought I remembered some X86 parts with FPGAs integrated, but when I couldn't find any mention of them on Intel's main site under their FPGA solutions I figured that was just my memory playing tricks on me and it just something I figured they'd release. Considering they're not even mentioned on their main site under their FPGA products I suspect they never got any further than sampling pre-production silicon. Because if they were selling those products to vendors, then they'd be on that site along with all the other clearly business-to-business products on there.

[coder]

Because if they were selling those products to vendors, then they'd be on that site along with all the other clearly business-to-business products on there.

Careful with that. There are products in Intel's catalog that don't show up in their listings, even though they're still in the parts database. I first ran across this, when I looked up the CPU model number from an old Dell workstation at my job. The part number indeed had a database entry on ark.intel.com, but wouldn't appear in the query results for listing the product line to which it claimed to belong.

I think Apple products often have CPUs like this, except they might even be vendor-exclusive (i.e. model numbers you never see in non-Apple products). In my case, I think it was just a low-spec SKU they sold via special arrangements, but not on the open market.

[L_A_G]

...

That's just one specific SKU and probably a revision/respin of another part made to fix some normally errata-fixed silicon bug(s). I'm talking about a whole product segment here and with the cost of developing high end silicon these days you're going to need far customers for it to be worthwhile than just some revisions/respins of existing silicon.

[coder]

That's just one specific SKU and probably a revision/respin of another part made to fix some normally errata-fixed silicon bug(s).

That doesn't generate a new model number. CPUs have a separate stepping indicator, for that sort of thing.