AMD to acquire SeaMicro

[wlee15]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/251015/amd_buys_seamicro_enters_server_hardware_business.html

That's somewhat of a surprising move for AMD.

 

[gmaster456]

For those too lazy to click the link. This is not everything though.

AMD will pay US$334 million in cash and stock for SeaMicro, a 40-employee Silicon Valley startup that has gained attention for building highly dense and power-efficient servers for use in large-scale cloud computing environments. SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman will become general manager of a new division at AMD, the Data Center Server Solutions group.
AMD plans to sell SeaMicro-branded servers directly to customers, but it bought the company primarily for its technology, which it hopes to license to other server vendors to build their own low-power systems, AMD officials said.
"SeaMicro has a proven technology that has been benchmarked in key customer sites to show improvements in power consumption and total cost of ownership. That [intellectual property] was very attractive to us," said Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager for AMD's products division.
The move will be seen as a setback to Intel, which had built a tight partnership with SeaMicro. All the servers SeaMicro currently sells are based on low-power Intel Atom processors, and just a few weeks ago the companies held a joint press conference where Intel sang SeaMicro's praises.
An Intel spokesman declined to comment on the acquisition Wednesday before it was officially announced.
AMD will continue to sell SeaMicro servers based on Intel processors "for the foreseeable future," Lu said. By the end of this year, she said, it will release the first SeaMicro servers based on AMD Opteron processors.

 

[jpeyton]

I think it makes sense. SeaMicro got in the headlines for high-density, low-power Atom-based servers.

AMD's low-power APUs have more horsepower than Atom, and have on-die GPUs that could add even more processing power into the mix. And that's only their current generation stuff.

 

[pelov]

Well that's interesting...

AMD will continue to sell SeaMicro servers based on Intel processors...

AMD will be selling Intel atom chips. Is it me or is hell freezing over?

 

[Idontcare]

Interesting :hmm:

Brazos 2.0 servers incoming?

 

[Abwx]

281m$ for a 40 employees firm ?...
The stocks , i dont count them , that s at the expense
of the other share holders , they will surely appreciate....

 

[blckgrffn]

Interesting :hmm:

Brazos 2.0 servers incoming?

Surely?

It will be interesting to see if they come out with a part that has greater than two cores.

Any idea what that IP was AMD is referring to?

Depending on what it is and its effects on power consumption, the price tag might be very well justified.

@ pelov - haha. I am guessing SeaMicro will no longer be in the loop as to Intel's plans around low power chips, however

 

[pelov]

SeaMicro developed an interconnect technology that allows it to eliminate all but three of the chips on a standard server motherboard. That allowed it to develop servers that it claims consume one quarter the power and one sixth the space of standard x86 servers.

SeaMicro invented and patented technology called CPU I/O virtualization, which dramatically reduces the power draw of the
non-CPU portion of a server by eliminating 90 percent of the
components from the motherboard. CPU I/O virtualization
allows SeaMicro to shrink the mother board to the size of a credit card thereby enabling hundreds of more power efficient CPUs
to replace traditional power hungry multi-core processors.

http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/TO1_SM10000_Technology_Overview.pdf

It sounds like server farms running on raspberry Pi's

SeaMicro invented technology that combines CPU management
and load balancing, allowing us to dynamically allocate workloads to specific CPUs on the basis of power-usage metrics. This
ensures that the active CPUs operate in the most energy efficient
range of utilization. In addition it allows the user to create pools
of CPUs for a given application and can then dynamically add
compute resources to the pool based on predefined utilization
thresholds.

With what Fujitsu is doing with their supercomputer K, it seems like this would be quite potent.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...rcomputer-fujitsus-k-saves-on-power-and-money

Load and power allocation varying on the CPU and the % load.

 

[sandorski]

Very interesting.

 

[grimpr]

I bet they're gonna scale up Bobcat with server features, just like IDC predicted!

 

[senseamp]

Competing directly with their other server customers, and paying for a server company just to get their chips into servers. Desperation move.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

AMD's low-power APUs have more horsepower than Atom, and have on-die GPUs that could add even more processing power into the mix.

Actually, GPGPU is pretty much entirely uninteresting for the kind of workloads the seamicro servers sell. However, the bobcat cpu line is designed to be very modular -- it will be very easy for AMD to produce chips which drop the GPU for, say, 6 extra cores.

 

[drizek]

paying for a server company just to get their chips into servers. Desperation move.

They're just doing what has been working for Intel.

 

[senseamp]

They're just doing what has been working for Intel.

What server vendor does Intel own?

 

[Phynaz]

Cool, maybe.

Hope this isn't a distraction.

 

[Idontcare]

What server vendor does Intel own?

Not sure on the owning, but they sure managed to pwn a few over time

(how many tied themselves to the mast of S.S. Itanium only to see themselves made irrelevant by doing so? )

 

[gorobei]

maybe brazos integer parts combined with gcn shaders for vector or hpc function. put enough of them on a blade server and you might be able to do some higher end compute stuff.

 

[StarTech]

What server vendor does Intel own?

Well, I do not know about servers, but Intel has been making motherboards for long time.

I have never heard of AMD branded motherboards.

 

[thilanliyan]

Must have asked every AMD employee to check under their couch cushions for change to pull this off!!

 

[ViRGE]

AMD will be selling Intel atom chips. Is it me or is hell freezing over?

*taps the pond*

It sure looks that way. I hope everyone packed ice skates.

 

[itsmydamnation]

bobcat cores are very good at integer workloads, good enough for SSE1/2. get maybe 25-30% better performance from jaguar assuming dual cores ,clock increase + IPC at same wattage and add either AES instructions or have Crypto ASICS and you could make a brutishly good cloud/web/VPS server, better then ATOM thats for sure.

AMD will need to get a product like that to market ASAP the time for it is now.

dont worry about HSA for this, but if jaguar cores are already going to have GCN ( i have no idea if they will) it could be useful but unlikely a selling point. Given the likely low volume ultra high margin area a solution like this fills i think they can afford to leave the GPU idle , actually on second thoughts it could be a awesomely awesome VDI solution as GPU access is one of the biggest pain in the arse areas of VDI currently.

 

[tulx]

Well, I do not know about servers, but Intel has been making motherboards for long time.

I have never heard of AMD branded motherboards.

There's good AMD branded RAM, though.

 

[Olikan]

AMD

(SeaMicro's) founder and chief technology officer Gary Lauterbach, who was previously an AMD fellow and one of five architects who build the core of AMD’s Opteron processor

You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave

 

[NTMBK]

AMD



You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave

After Bulldozer, buying an entire company just to get back the guy behind Opteron doesn't seem unreasonable

 

[exar333]

281m$ for a 40 employees firm ?...
The stocks , i dont count them , that s at the expense
of the other share holders , they will surely appreciate....

Was thinking the same thing. They are all singing 'we're in the money!' right now. LOL, good for them. Most of them are probably made now...