AMD may be best known for making processors and graphics cards that are used in some laptop and desktop computers. But a few years ago AMD acquired a company called SeaMicro which had been building “dense servers” that packed hundreds of small, low-power chips together to create high-performance, low-power servers.

Now AMD is getting out of the dense server space.

seamicro

The chip maker made the announcement while releasing its financial report for the first quarter of 2015. Both revenue and net income for the quarter were down substantially from a year earlier, but AMD says part of that comes from a $75 million charge related to the winding down of SeaMicro.

Does this mean that dense servers are a dead end? Not necessarily… but it does mean that AMD made a decision that the SeaMicro brand wasn’t helping the company get where it wanted to go at a time when the microprocessor industry is rapidly changing.

AMD continues to offer a range of chips aimed at laptop and desktop computers as well as low-power chips for tablets, mini-desktops, and other devices where you might expect to find an Intel Atom chip. AMD is also working on server chips based on ARM designs.

via AnandTech and AMD

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6 replies on “AMD exit “dense server” business, puts SeaMicro brand to sleep”

  1. There is no real reason for a Chinese company to buy the dead weight of AMD. Any Chinese company would just licence the ARM designs themselves and build them. Like rockchip do.
    They only possible reason you may want it is if you wanted the patent portfolio.

    Do they still even have a Fab?
    I don’t think the Dense Low power server market is dead. It’s ideal as a cloud platform. ?But for heavy workloads you wouldn’t use them. Perhaps it’s time for more investment in the MIPS64 platform from Imagination.

  2. Write down what I’ll say: The next x86 processor, the successor FX series, will also be another huge disappointment. Nothing they try to do work out, seem unlucky. The future of AMD is to be bought by some Chinese company that makes ARM processors.

    AMD IS DEAD !!!

  3. AMD is too far behind Intel to compete in the low-wattage econo server CPUs, or the higher performance CPUs.

    The 20w Avoton boards are far beyond anything AMD offers (in terms of performance-per-watt), and the new 20-45w Xeon-D CPUs are going to put AMD even further behind.

  4. This always seemed like a really dumb company buy anyway. I remember when AMD were selling servers with Intel processors. Very strange.

    1. The interlink technology was seamicro, thus it was supposedly still profitable even if iit used Intel processors. What might be interesting is like a game server using g series processors that use only a couple watts or next gen multi core (8-16) chips at a lower wattage.

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