AMD buys Thinking: the’goal is to rival Intel and NVIDIA

AMD announced an agreement to purchase the Thinking for about $1.9 billion. Pensando’s services platform helps improve data center performance through the use of processor’optimization. Thinking portfolio should be matched with AMD&#8217s existing offerings, according to AMD president and CEO Lisa Su.

“All major cloud customers and OEMs have adopted EPYC processors to enhance their data center offerings“, said Su. “Today, with the acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our portfolio of high-performance CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and adaptive SoCs“.

Thinking already has several high-profile customers, including Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud and Goldman Sachs. The purchase should improve AMD&#8217s ability to compete in the data center industry. Analyst Patrick Moorhead compares Thinking to AWS Nitro.

However, the acquisition of Pensando is expected to fill several gaps AMD has in the data center space, allowing it to catch up and begin to rival two of the industry&#8217s biggest biggies, namely Intel and NVIDIA.

“This brings AMD into the NPU or IPU market” said Moorhead (TechCrunch). “It will compete with Intel, Nvidia and Marvell. Thinking has an’excellent range of enterprise and cloud customers. Likes”.

Girish Bablani, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure, also had his say about the’announcement of this acquisition.

“We have seen a 40-fold improvement in overall performance related to cloud-based connectivity. Thinking has delivered this result in less than 12 months. This partnership has enabled a transformative change to ‘limitless networking’ which will ensure that our customers have access to Microsoft Azure&#8217s highest performing products and services.”

Customers include:
– Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Equinox
– HPE Aruba, Dell Tech, NetApp
– Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo
Impressive.

— Patrick Moorhead (@PatrickMoorhead) April 4, 2022