AMD China X86 Server Chip Joint Venture Brings them $293 Million In Cash
AMD is likely to fab custom enterprise CPUs for the Chinese Government. The deal was mentioned in the latest quarterly results. China, or the Chinese government struggles to design their own proprietary chips. This deal could fetch AMD USD $293 million in cash.
China wants their “own” hardware and software for government-funded institutions. This was driven by the Snowden revelations and the cooling of the China economy. For software, it means submitting source code to inspect for things like back doors, but also having Chinese institutions buy software from Chinese software vendors. It’s a bit more complex on the hardware side. Net-net, on the server side it involves Chinese companies integrating core IP from western countries, adding their own “special sauce” like security and accelerators and selling to Chinese server OEMs. This is exactly what happened with Advanced Micro Devices announcement today of its China JV reports forbes.com
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has created a JV with THATIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd.) to develop SoCs for the Chinese server market. Essentially, AMD will license its x86 processor technology and the IP (intellectual property) related to designing an SoC (system on chip), so I expect this involves IP like memory controllers, input/output and caching, but not GPU technology.
Neither THATIC or AMD is commenting on which flavor cores these will be or any more technical details, but Forbes claims it has to be Zen as AMD hasn’t had much of any success in servers with its current CPU cores.
Senior Member
Posts: 327
Joined: 2013-10-29
Only $293 million and a fast developing nation of only about ~1.4b people
Member
Posts: 92
Joined: 2010-07-30
Too bad for AMD, once the Chinese do the only thing they do best (reverse engineer everything Western, copy, steal) AMD will be out cold. AMD is even more desperate than I imagined. Creating stuff directly for a communist government. Aren't there laws against that in the US? By the way, USD $293?!
Senior Member
Posts: 10061
Joined: 2006-02-14
If there aren't there should be. I'm actually surprised AMD are allowed to do this. Intel was blocked from shipping a metric ton of processors to one of the supercomputer labs in China, yet AMD is allowed to do this... wat.
Senior Member
Posts: 8185
Joined: 2010-11-16
Relax. Cold War is finished.
Time to make a lot of great deals

Senior Member
Posts: 2481
Joined: 2014-01-21
They need any and every deal they can get in my opinion, Otherwise how else can they compete with a Giant like Intel, I say take it and keep-on-truckin! I still have some of my Amd Fan-boy left in me, part of me wants them to bounce back so they can fix some price issues that Intel has been exploiting lately. Not that Amd wouldnt do the same.Still waiting on that Zen.