AMD to acquire SeaMicro for $334million
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Advanced Micro Devices has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a specialist in energy efficient, high bandwidth microservers, for approximately $334million.
According to AMD, the acquisition will enable the semiconductor developer to speed up its strategy to deliver disruptive server technology to its OEM customers serving cloud-centric data centres.
AMD believes that SeaMicro's experience in fabric technology and system level design capabilities will uniquely position it to offer industry leading server building blocks tuned for dynamic web content, social networking, search and video. By combining its server technology with SeaMicro technology, AMD states that it can provide a range of processors and platforms that can 'significantly' reduce data centre complexity, cost and energy consumption while improving performance. The first devices to combine both companies' technology will be the AMD Opteron processor based solutions, due for launch in the second half of 2012. AMD adds that it will continue to focus and invest in its traditional server business.
"By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data centre leadership position," said Rory Read, president and CEO, AMD, pictured. "SeaMicro is a pioneer in low power server technology. The unmatched combination of AMD's processing capabilities, SeaMicro's system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing segment of the server market."
According to SeaMicro, systems featuring its technology typically use one quarter the power and take one sixth the space of traditional servers with the same compute performance, yet deliver up to 12 times the bandwidth per core2.
One of SeaMicro's innovations is its supercompute fabric, which connects thousands of processor cores, memory, storage and input/output traffic. It also supports multiple processor instruction sets. The firm's technology is currently deployed in multiple sites across the world.
Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro CEO, who will become general manager of AMD's newly created Data Center Server Solutions business, said: "Cloud computing has brought a sea change to the data centre - dramatically altering the economics of compute by changing the workload and optimal characteristics of a server. SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth. By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market."
