Private firm to buy 20 per cent of AMD

Private firm to buy 20 per cent of AMD

 

A Private Equity firm called Silver Lake, a company which has invested in many successful companies like Dell, GoDaddy and Motorola, is about to buy 20% of AMD, giving the company some much needed funding and support. 

This information is claimed to be confirmed by several industry insiders by Fudzilla, though no official information on this deal is currently available. 

 

 

This additional funding will be very helpful for AMD, who have recently been struggling in both the CPU and GPU markets. Hopefully this funding and the expertise of Silver Lake will allow AMD greatly improve it’s future product stacks and allow them to deliver more new products to the market. 

AMD has recently hired some industry heavyweights like Jim Keller, Raja Koduri and Mark Papermaster to make sure that their next Generation designs will be a significant leap in performance and efficiency and become much more competitive with the competition.

 

 

AMD’s current product stacks does not contain many products which are “new” strictly speaking, especially on the desktop side. AMD’s current high end CPU offerings are still using AMD’s ageing Piledriver architecture and on the lower end side they are still using their Kaveri architecture, which over a year old.

On the GPU side we can see that a lot of their lower range product stack is still using some core designs which have been used for several generations. AMD is currently waiting to move to a new process node and is working to conserve their funds until then by reusing some older designs. AMD has hopes that their next generation of FinFET based products will be able to move AMD into a successful and profitable future, moving on the CPU side to their all new Zen architecture and to a Post-GCN GPU architecture. 

While right now AMD is travelling on a difficult path we know that they have a big year, or two, ahead of them as their all new designs and products finally make it to market.

 

You can join the discussion on AMD selling 20% of the company to Silver lake on the OC3D Forums.