In February of this year, AMD officially announced the completion of the acquisition of Xilinx.
The acquisition of Xilinx proved to be of great strategic value to AMD, and in amd's first quarter 2022 financial report released yesterday, Xilinx's first quarter revenue since the completion of the acquisition was $559 million and operating profit was $233 million. While not comparable to the $2.8 billion in the Computing and Graphics Products division and $2.5 billion in the Enterprise, Embedded, and Semi-Custom Products divisions, there is still a lot of revenue.
Of course, the acquisition of a company not only depends on its revenue capacity, but also its technical strength is the top priority. Xilinx is the world's largest FFPGA chip manufacturer, AMD's acquisition of them is also mainly focused on the FPGA chip in the data center, especially in the field of AI powerful capabilities.
On yesterday's earnings call, AMD also announced that it will integrate Xilinx's FPGA-driven AI inference engine in the CPU, and the first products are expected to be available in 2023.
AMD CEO Su Zifeng said that AMD has the best portfolio of high-performance and adaptive computing engines in the industry, and has the opportunity to provide a stronger portfolio with their expanded technology portfolio. In addition to hardware, AMD is also developing unified software to help developers use AI capabilities for inference and training.
Su Zifeng said that Xilinx will enable AMD to have a broader product portfolio in the field of AI hardware, surpassing the current CPU and GPU capabilities.
In addition, for the software to be launched in the future, AMD's software may change the operating model in the future, Su Zifeng also said on the conference call that the future will explore the model of software charging, after all, Nvidia and Intel have made money from software, AMD of course will not miss such a business model.
In fact, AMD is not the first company to do so, as early as 2015, Intel acquired Altera, the largest FPGA vendor at the time, for $16.7 billion, and also made related attempts. However, Intel did not ship related chips until 2018, and it is still provided in a limited experimental manner. We haven't seen many Intel projects on this until now.