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Rumours hit the net last week that Samsung may be interested in a takeover of AMD. AMD have been struggling for some time to compete with Intel and Nvidia in the CPU and GPU markets respectively and they are also dealing with a fair bit of debt – a problem Samsung could deal with quickly. With Samsung's influence, and world-class chip manufacturing facilities they could surely help AMD drive forward new hardware designs. Samsung would also get access to one of two companies licensed to produce x86 processors.
We decided to pose the question to KitGuru TV regular Leo Waldock, and we invited Luke Hill, KitGuru's processor and motherboard hardware editor to discuss the topic today. Would a Samsung takeover of AMD be a good move for the enthusiast user?
While there are many ways to look at a possible Samsung takeover of AMD here are some key points to bear in mind.
For:
- Samsung gets console chips contract and long term revenue.
- Samsung acquire x86 license.
- AMD get access to Samsung production.
- Samsung get AMD CPU and GPU IP.
- Would clear AMD debt.
Against:
- Samsung could force AMD teams to move away from desktop arena.
- AMD could lose x86 license.
- Heavy job cuts are possible.
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Samsung would get access to APU, HSA, ARM Server and GPU IPs. Forget about x86, that’s likely to be lost. Remember that Qualcomm purchased AMD/ATI mobile graphics to bring us Adreno and other than Mali and Imagination, there’s not much choice on the market.
imo, that would be good for amd… but don’t leave desktop arena, atleast for graphic card
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Leaving desktop arena? They won’t do it.
AMD ARM server project is deeply tied with x86 so is APU, GPU+x86.
Unless they went crazy to seperate the IPs altogether, I don’t know what the point of doing that.
Also leaving desktop arena would mean intel monopoly, nobody will allow that.
Desire, surely that would leave Intel as the planet’s only x86 CPU manufacturer which would prompt anti-trust types to consider a break-up for Intel, unless another company took over the x86 assets.
Strictly speaking, nothing prevents Intel from licensing x86 in a limited way to the likes of Rockchip. VIA is also still doing x86 as far as I remember. Bear in mind that Intel may still be dominant in x86 but they will argue that the computing market is no longer what it is used to be with ARM-based and non-Wintel devices generating big money.
I remember a slide from a presentation from ARM’s head of servers (back then), the guy they got when Seamicro was purchased. That slide read, ARM will win in the long run. http://files.itproportal.com/wp-content/uploads/photos/arm_fullwidth.jpg
It wouldn’t be good for consumers as I don’t think Intel would give Samsung a good deal on a x86 license or not at all. That would allow Intel to put whatever prices they want on their own products and not to bother pushing the architecture forward as much as they do just now.
I wonder what happens if samsung bought AMD and then starts to use its 14nm production factories for lets say AMDs current cpu architectures or maybe even the new ones. (doesnt matter if they work or not, lets say these chips work just fine) wouldnt these chips be able to directly compete with the current intel chips on just about every level? price, performance, power consumption, etc.?
All these rumors are generated due to “lost in translation” effect from this single article: http://economy.hankooki.com/lpage/industry/201503/e20150317173417120250.htm The actual contents of that article doesn’t really mention about Samsung being currently interested in acquiring AMD at all, but rather the industry insiders regards/considers that Samsung should buy AMD (based on a previous statement made by Samsung back in 2007)…
Currently the overall market share for ARM servers actually stands at nearly 0%. There are very few real ARM server products around at the moment (HP Moonshot: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proliant-servers/product-detail.html?oid=7398907 , SoftIron: http://www.softiron.co.uk/products/ and coming soon from GigaByte: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9107/gigabyte-server-releases-arm-solutions-using-appliedmicro-and-annapurna-labs-socs ). AMD’s ARM based Opteron A1100 is still nowhere to be seen (since July last year, except for that $2999 developement board: http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/server/opteron-a-series ), and was not even used in any of their own SeaMicro server products yet (reference: http://www.seamicro.com/products ). The reality is that ARM servers are still in its infancy…
I know that. But the only way is up from there and doubling your market share is pretty easy when you have nothing.
At the moment ARM server chips are relegated to very specific functions like storage (example in Baidu: http://www.marvell.com/company/news/pressDetail.do?releaseID=3576 probably the only major ARM server deployment known) and web caching (as in HP Moonshot mentioned earlier). This is mainly due to lack of standardization (as most ARM chips are highly customized) and server software maturity (an effort is underway here: https://www.linaro.org/ ). Also those ARM server boards aren’t exactly very cheap either.
I am acutely aware of these facts. Many however want to see a challenger to Intel otherwise, they fear going back to the days of yore when Intel was not exactly championing innovation.
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Nowadays Intel is competing mostly with itself, or rather with its previous generations chips (especially from Sandy Bridge generation onwards). That’s why they need to design even faster and more compelling chips to keep the upgrade cycle moving. The new Skylake: http://www.vrworld.com/2015/03/25/intel-to-launch-two-broadwell-cpus-for-desktop-skylake-debuting-in-october/ is still quite unknown yet. On the highly profitable server markets, Intel is still maintaining their momentum. This year, they just launched Broadwell-DE (Xeon D): http://www.anandtech.com/show/9070/intel-xeon-d-launched-14nm-broadwell-soc-for-enterprise and very soon Knights Landing (next generation Xeon Phi) as well: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/44225/details-intels-next-gen-knights-landing-platform/index.html (the massive chip is already up and running). As for the mircro server segment, check this old article out: http://www.servethehome.com/cavium-thunderx-48-core-arm-design-announced/ on Intel versus ARM…