AMD spent $35 billion to acquire Xilinx, which is a highlight of the merger of two well run companies to become a data center giant.

The biggest question will be whether AMD can leverage Xilinx's highly adaptable and programmable chip system, which Intel was unable to achieve when acquiring Altera. AMD CEO Lisa Su and Xilinx CEO Victor Peng share a common plan and history.

The following are the main gains from AMD's acquisition of Xilinx. AMD and XILINX hope to do better than Intel and Altera. Prior to Intel's acquisition of Alterl, CPU and GPU companies could thrive by acquiring a field programmable gate array (FPGA) company. That acquisition was not the expected game changer. What's different this time?

Su said:

We have been considering it for some time now. I think this is actually a very different situation. Xilinx is a market leader. What I mean is, if you look at the growth of their business over the past few years, their market share is still growing. I think both companies have performed very well.

So why are you asking now? We feel very good about our basic business. When people see our business, they say they are complementary. From the perspective of products and markets, they are very complementary. But we have some important intersections in data center and technology strategy, right? I mean, we are all cutting-edge technology users. We are all partners of TSMC. We have all truly learned about this modular design environment, and Xilinx is a leader in some aspects of it - some 2.5D, 3D integrations. We all invest in software and open source. With the implementation of the roadmap, there are many synergies. Our culture is very consistent. We love technology. We share a common vision. I think we have a bold idea of what we can do for this industry and our joint venture company. I am not very good at mergers and acquisitions. We are not conducting mergers and acquisitions for the sake of acquiring.

Xilinx CEO Victor Peng stated:

I think this is completely different from that transaction. I think I just want to understand one fact, as Lisa said, we have a very common view on the transformation that is happening, not only in the data center, but also in edge and even endpoint applications. AMD and XILINX will integrate workload based architectures instead of a single approach. Su pointed out that "the era of single-chip integration may have ended. " She added, "We have been using this chip technology because it is the right approach. You can perform accurate calculations for the correct workload. The Xilinx team also has very advanced thinking in this area. I think we will have the opportunity to do something in terms of hardware. But I think this is more like a market specific optimization, because we are considering what customers need.

Of course, in terms of software environment, we pay great attention to it because it is the key to accelerating adoption. So we have many opportunities to combine our investment portfolios together. But in fact, I believe the opportunity lies at the solution level, with customers and important workloads.