To bulk up its data center products, AMD is buying Pensando, a California-based company that develops chips called data processing units (DPU), for $1.9 billion.
AMD already produces CPUs and graphics chips for data centers and supercomputers, which has helped it attract orders from major businesses. However, the tech industry is also experiencing demand for DPU chips. These programmable processors can help a data center move computed data across a network, whether it be to the CPU, GPUs, or to storage.
Nvidia has addressed the DPU market with its own Bluefield processors while Intel has created chips dubbed “Infrastructure Processing Units.” Now it seems AMD is responding by turning to Pensando, which already sells to major clients, including IBM’s and Microsoft’s cloud platforms.
“In real-world cloud deployments, Pensando’s solution demonstrates between 8x and 13x greater performance compared to competitive solutions,” AMD says.
The acquisition also gives AMD a broad portfolio of technologies it can sell to corporations. In 2020, the company paid $35 billion for Xilinx, a provider of field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. “Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio,” AMD CEO Lisa Su says in the announcement.
The company’s FAQ on the acquisition adds: “We believe this is going to be a critical requirement to deliver the performance, power efficiency and capabilities required to power the next generation of accelerated data centers at scale.”
The deal is expected to close in this year’s second quarter, pending regulatory approval.
