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AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

wsj.com

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Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#81

Post by marketgod »

gigatexal wrote: post #70
ksec wrote: post #50

I have been looking forward to this happening for a long time. A quick search on my past comment shows that was 2016. And I remember checking Xilinx market cap last year and it was ~$30+ B, while AMD was only ~$50 B. I was thinking the chance of that ever happening is going to be very slim. ( I was an AMD Shareholder, but I never thought it would be $100B mark cap company, sold it all last year) Now AMD is at $100B+,…

I sold a few shares when they were at 20 or some dollars a share thinking AMD would stay second fiddle to Intel for the rest of time. Turns out I am a terrible value investor.

Don't buy cheap stocks and hope they go up. Buy expensive stocks and watch them go up.

You should sit on some TSLA for now also.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#82

Post by derision »

panpanna wrote: post #56
amirhirsch wrote: post #36

I think this is a terrible idea for the future of technology. AMD would not be existentially dependent on the FPGA market and the stack is so important to cutting-edge tech that it demands focused stewardship. It's clear something needs to change in FPGA land. Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices. Xilinx pr…

Agreed, altera looks dead since intel took over. This is probably good news only for Lattice Semiconductor.

When Jim Anderson left AMD to take on CEO at Lattice I invested heavily in them with the thesis that there would be an eventually merger. Unsure what to do now

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#84

Post by mikepurvis »

Traster wrote: post #74
wtallis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would accessing the FPGA through registers instead of instruction opcodes do anything to address the issue of needing to ensure that the FPGA is currently configured to behave in the manner expected by the current process, as opposed to the FPGA still being configured to suit the process that was running before the last context switch?

The fundamental way that an FPGA works (more or less) is to program the configuration registers with values that then determine the routing. One thing you could do is have multiple sets of these configuration registers, at process start you allocate one configuration to that process and set it up, from that point onwards you when you despatch instructions to the functional unit you do it along with the process config…

Sounds workable, though you'd also need a way to save and restore any internal state, or else some way to mark off checkpoints where it is interruptible.

The other thing to note is that this only covers using the FPGA for compute. While that's the obvious use-case for an "FPGA in CPU" concept, in the real world, IO is a pretty important part of many non-cryptocurrency FPGA applications, whether you're just counting edges on some input like an encoder, providing a highly time-sensitive output signal, such as for an SDR, or implementing some custom serial protocol.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#85

Post by phkahler »

gigatexal wrote: post #70
ksec wrote: post #50

I have been looking forward to this happening for a long time. A quick search on my past comment shows that was 2016. And I remember checking Xilinx market cap last year and it was ~$30+ B, while AMD was only ~$50 B. I was thinking the chance of that ever happening is going to be very slim. ( I was an AMD Shareholder, but I never thought it would be $100B mark cap company, sold it all last year) Now AMD is at $100B+,…

I sold a few shares when they were at 20 or some dollars a share thinking AMD would stay second fiddle to Intel for the rest of time. Turns out I am a terrible value investor.

I thought about buying them at under $2 a few years ago but didnt... I probably would have cashed out half my share at $8 or $15 thinking the catchup to Intel was temporary. I'm glad they are doing well. There is no perfect crystal ball.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#86

Post by amirhirsch »

pjbk wrote: post #63
amirhirsch wrote: post #36

I think this is a terrible idea for the future of technology. AMD would not be existentially dependent on the FPGA market and the stack is so important to cutting-edge tech that it demands focused stewardship. It's clear something needs to change in FPGA land. Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices. Xilinx pr…

Totally agree. Being involved with FPGAs for 20+ years now, and Xilinx for the most part of it, I have witnessed the progressive decay of their software quality. The legacy Xilinx tools (Foundation) were far from perfect but at least useable -- and hackable to a degree if you needed to implement workarounds. Those were many times even suggested by Xilinx own employees that were easy to approach and responsive back in…

I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to print out a poster that says “TCL scripts (yikes, it’s 2020!)” with the Xilinx logo for our office...

You can always tell when someone is a seasoned FPGA veteran by the quality of their rants about the tools.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#87

Post by phkahler »

ece wrote: post #37
dheera wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also weird because shareholders want stocks to grow indefinitely at an exponential rate, whereas there are a whole lot of companies like Xilinx that don't really need to grow all that much beyond just scaling to a number of gates that is useful to today's industry. Or Dropbox, which I really don't want them doing anything innovative except syncing my directories between machines until the end of time.

Mature and stable companies tend to pay dividends, and investing in them is a fine thing to do for risk averse investors or portfolios.

You gotta have a low P/E to pay dividends. It's the only sensible long term strategy. It gets ruined when people drive up stock prices playing the greater fool strategy.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#88

Post by adwn »

pjbk wrote: post #63
amirhirsch wrote: post #36

I think this is a terrible idea for the future of technology. AMD would not be existentially dependent on the FPGA market and the stack is so important to cutting-edge tech that it demands focused stewardship. It's clear something needs to change in FPGA land. Xilinx and Intel both produce abhorrent FPGA software causing project delays and cancellations of cutting-edge technology dependent on their devices. Xilinx pr…

Totally agree. Being involved with FPGAs for 20+ years now, and Xilinx for the most part of it, I have witnessed the progressive decay of their software quality. The legacy Xilinx tools (Foundation) were far from perfect but at least useable -- and hackable to a degree if you needed to implement workarounds. Those were many times even suggested by Xilinx own employees that were easy to approach and responsive back in…

> Vivado is a mess.

I recently encountered a bug in the Vivado IP integrator packaging whatever crap where if you left the "Vendor name" field at its default value '(none)', the packaging aborted with an error because that field contained invalid characters: the parentheses. That's a bug that any kind of testing should have caught (two bugs, actually).

Also: Why does Vivado have to treat any little IP core I create like it's some full-fledged library that exists independently of my main project? I just want to attach a 50-line HDL module to an AXI interconnect in the block diagram – I don't want to create a new project for this, ffs.

Re: AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx

#90

Post by jhallenworld »

So when Intel bought Altera their Stratix-10 was announced to be manufactured on Intel's fab. Predictably (Intel is not an open fab business) this massively delayed Stratix-10.

At least AMD is fabless so there should be no such issue with Xilinx.

Both Altera and Xilinx sell premium devices in terms of cost. If you make a high volume product based on an FPGA and care about profit margin, you are better off with Lattice (assuming their devices are performant enough for your application). It would be nice if any of these acquisitions made the FPGA prices more competitive, but I doubt it.

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