Joseph Tsai

 

AMD has announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a pioneer in energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers, for approximately US$334 million, of which approximately US$281 million will be paid in cash. Through the acquisition of SeaMicro, AMD will be accelerating its strategy to deliver disruptive server technology to its OEM customers serving cloud-centric data centers. With SeaMicro's fabric technology and system-level design capabilities, AMD will be uniquely positioned to offer industry-leading server building blocks tuned for the fastest-growing workloads such as dynamic web content, social networking, search and video.

AMD's server technology combined with SeaMicro technology provides customers with a range of processor choices and platforms that can help significantly reduce data center complexity, cost and energy consumption while improving performance. AMD plans to offer the first AMD Opteron processor-based solutions that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology in the second half of 2012. The company said it remains firmly committed to its traditional server business, and will continue to focus and invest in this area.

SeaMicro technologies offer substantial advantages in large data center and cloud environments. Cloud data centers are projected to be the fastest growing segment of the server market through 2015, according to IDC. Current systems featuring SeaMicro 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 core.

Foremost among SeaMicro's innovations is their supercompute fabric, which connects thousands of processor cores, memory, storage and input/output traffic. SeaMicro's fabric supports multiple processor instruction sets. SeaMicro solutions are currently deployed in multiple sites across the world. AMD will continue to support all current SeaMicro customers while accelerating plans to deliver new platforms that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology and enable AMD's OEM partners to bring differentiated solutions to market.

The acquisition does not change AMD's 2012 financial guidance and the transaction is expected to be accretive to earnings after 2012. AMD will fund the cash portion of the acquisition with existing cash reserves.