AMD China X86 Server Chip Joint Venture Brings them $293 Million In Cash

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 04/22/2016 08:19 AM | source: | 11 comment(s)

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.

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thatguy91
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Joined: 2010-08-27

#5262049 Posted on: 04/23/2016 08:04 AM

It's not as if China couldn't just buy the processors from a different country anyway. This goes for any AMD or Intel CPU. I think the report may not reflect the truth 100 percent though, I like to point out this quote from the article:

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.

AMD can't actually give China the design for such a CPU, simply because they do not own x86. In fact, it can't even be 64-bit only, because x64 is based on x86 intellectual property. It's just like if Intel were to do this, it could only be 32-bit or IA64, it can't be x64 since that is owned by AMD. Sounds like the Chinese government can't buy off the shelf either due to the extra 'stuff' they want on the chip. The chip will likely therefore be server Zen based with the Chinese stuff added to the CPU die, but manufactured by thy foundries used by AMD.

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