Business Korea quoted a well-known analyst as saying that the us-based chipmaker Intel's resale of its flash memory manufacturing facilities to SK Hynix for $90 is expected to be approved by China by the end of 2021, after the British, American and South Korean authorities have passed the antitrust risk review of the transaction. Meanwhile, a paRR report pointed out that Intel rival AMD's acquisition of Xilinx, a configurable integrated circuit design company, has not yet been confirmed.
SK Hynix announced the acquisition in October 2020. The latest report from The Korean media believes that the transaction is expected to be completed in the third week of December 2021.
At that time, SK Hynix will pay most of the amount to Intel ($7 billion), but the transfer of related intellectual property rights ($2 billion) will not be completed until March 2025.
Intel said in an official press release that the company will use this part of the funds to provide industry-leading products and promote long-term growth priorities, including AI, 5G networks, intelligence, autonomous driving and other fields.
An example of an RCNN Tensor Flow machine learning object recognition model (Credit: Intel Community/MaryT)
According to Intel, mask RCNN deep neural networks are designed to solve the problem of instance segmentation in machine learning/computer vision. In other words, it is capable of separating different objects in an image or video.
In terms of artificial intelligence, the company has a Xenon product line that offers built-in AI accelerators to the data center computing market, and competes fiercely with AMD Dragon processors + MI200 series HPC/AI accelerator platforms.
In June 2019, Xilinx announced the Versal Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform, but AMD is still awaiting approval in China.
If the transaction closes successfully, Versal will greatly enhance AMD's diverse product lineup. However, according to PaRR, it is unclear what the official position is on AMD's acquisition of Xilinx.
Earlier this year, the regulatory review was moved to the second phase. If it is delayed to the third phase (which will take about two months), AMD may not be able to complete the acquisition by the end of 2021.