AMD to Acquire SeaMicro for Low Power Servers

AMD agreed to acquire SeaMicro, a developer of energy-efficient, high-bandwidth microservers, for approximately $334 million, of which approximately $281 million will be paid in cash.


SeaMicro, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, has created a new server architecture purpose-built for scale-out infrastructures such as those found in the web tier, online gaming, search and index computation. Among its innovations is a supercompute fabric, which connects thousands of processor cores, memory, storage and input/output traffic. SeaMicro's fabric supports multiple processor instruction sets.In 2009, the company received the largest U.S. Department of Energy grant given to a server company, $9.3 million, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The company was founded in 2007 and has approximately 80 employees.


AMD plans to offer the first AMD Opteron processor-based solutions that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology in the second half of 2012. AMD said it remains firmly committed to its traditional server business, and will continue to focus and invest in this area.


"Cloud computing has brought a sea change to the data center -- dramatically altering the economics of compute by changing the workload and optimal characteristics of a server," said Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro CEO, who will become general manager of AMD's newly created Data Center Server Solutions business. "SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth. By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market."http://www.amd.com
http://www.seamicro.com/