Rumours are circulating South Korean electronics firm Samsung is preparing an audacious takeover of AMD. The news come from a report in a South Korean business and economics journal as Samsung looks to fend off competition from Qualcomm and Intel in the mobile markets.
A buyout of team red would give Samsung total control over AMD, one of the leading CPU and graphics card manufacturers in the world. Samsung’s certainly no slouch itself in the hardware department, manufacturing 8GB GDDR5 memory chips for Nvidia, creating the rather swish Galaxy 6 Edge, and becoming the first in the world to produce 14nm SoCs.
In recent years Samsung has reportedly been working on its own GPU and CPU designs, but this acquisition would take them leaps and bounds forwards. AMD’s research budget was recently revealed to have hit a decade low, a stark contrast to Nvidia and Intel who have historical highs. The current estimated value is $2.17 billion, with shares available for $2.65 a pop. This is a sharp drop-off from a decade ago when AMD bought ATI and was worth around $20 billion. While AMD was once a major player in the processor market, it now holds just a 20% share of the PC CPU market. But, with the financial backing of Samsung it could clearly increase its foothold.
The Korean business journal Hankooki suggests such a move would be a win-win for both companies, and it’s difficult to see why it wouldn’t be. Samsung would gain access to AMD’s knowledge-base and IP, while AMD could really use that extra funding.
What this means for the future of AMD’s Radeon series of graphics cards is anybody’s guess. Certainly Samsung will be wanting a significant focus on mobile Socket on Chip (SoC) parts because its Galaxy range is where the money currently lies. Beyond this we know AMD is busy working away on in its next-generation Zen CPU microarchitecture, as well as its R9 400 Arctic Islands series of GPUs set for 2016.
Do you think this buyout will signal good or bad news for PC gamers?
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