

AMD to Acquire SeaMicro: Accelerates Disruptive Server Strategy - 18pfsmt
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amd-acquire-seamicro-accelerates-disruptive-211500968.html

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rektide
The custom ASIC work is interesting, but I tend to think Caldexa's approach of
just putting 4x10Gbit ethernet links on each CPU instead of building
specialized virtualization HW would be a more worthwhile advancement. That
said I think it's awesome and there's a huge opportunity for AMD to do great
things with some cool super small super dense computing here.

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noobface
This stuff is awesome for mass computation and clustering of intense CPU
applications, but with only 4GB of RAM per blade there seems to be some
applications limitations.

Regardless, SeaMicro is a great pickup for AMD. They've been getting their
asses absolutely handed to them in the server space. Hopefully this gets them
competitive again.

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Tuna-Fish
Actually, CPU intensive applications are a bad fit for seamicro products.
Basically, the cpus in their blades suck, and the entire architecture is
designed to favor io-heavy, jumpy (so not fit for GPU), but easily
partitionable loads. Basically, web servers.

with AMD, they will be able to better integrate the cpu cores with their IO
systems -- Intel was unwilling to let them fiddle around with Atom IP. I
expect that there will be some kind of custom-fit Bobcat-derived cpu products
for the web server market. Very low price tag, but also very low cost to
build.

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jacques_chester
I don't think it'll be low-cost at all. Not the sticker price, anyhow --
they'll be selling it in terms of computations per watt-meter^2.

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amalag
This is a very smart acquisition. From what I saw SeaMicro has a great
innovation in the form of their 'virtualize IO.' It is a great idea to share
IO of machines in a cluster. They can make big headway by integrating tuned
CPU's into those clusters. This is going after the entire stack of an IO bound
application.

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pheon
exit x86 market, there`s merit in that, check

exit the x86 market, enter the vertically integrated server hardware space,
this is insane.

why aren`t they spending that over a quarter of a _billion_ dollars on
building better cpus/gpus. not trying to become some sort of ibm.

