In what can be seen as a coup-de-data-centre against Intel, AMD has entered the server business with its acquisition of server manufacturer SeaMicro for $334 million in cash and stock options.
As part of the deal, SeaMicro’s current CEO, Andrew Feldman, will become general manager of AMD’s new Data Centre Server Solutions division.
SeaMicro – a startup with only 80 employees – specializes in manufacturing power efficient servers for use in cloud computing environments. Currently, the company uses Intel’s Atom processors to power their machines.
A mere month ago, Intel and SeaMicro held a press conference discussing how the two companies’ futures appeared “bright”.
Mr. Feldman wouldn’t comment on the exact details of the timing of SeaMicro-AMD deal, only claiming that it came about “unbelievably quickly”, and there were other non-chip vendor suitors also in line.
AMD’s Lisa Su, senior vice president and general manager of its products division, says the company plans to continue to offer SeaMicro branded servers directly to customers – even with Intel processors – until the end of the year when AMD plans to roll out Opteron powered servers.
AMD and SeaMicro have said that they will “explore” using SeaMicro’s fabrics with all sorts of chips; considering recent speculation that AMD may be in talks with ARM Holdings this could include ARM processors.
“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 Ms. Su.
Intel strained to maintain resolve after this announcement, with Intel’s Jason Waxman – the general manager of Intel’s High Density Computing group – telling Wired Enterprise that this “doesn’t change a whole lot” for the company.
“Being able to launch the SeaMicro product with Intel Xeon silicon was a good testimonial for us. They thought we were the best partner at the time,” said Mr. Waxman, longingly. “They chose our silicon for a reason.”
