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AMD to acquire microserver vendor SeaMicro--a user of Intel chips

Advanced Micro Devices to acquire microserver vendor SeaMicro for $334 million. To date, SeaMicro has used chips from Intel.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor
Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.
Brooke Crothers

Advanced Micro Devices will acquire server vendor SeaMicro in an attempt to make a run at Intel in the microserver market.

AMD said it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SeaMicro, a company that supplies energy-efficient microservers, for approximately $334 million.

To date, SeaMicro servers have been using Intel's Atom and Xeon processors. Future plans call for SeaMicro to build servers with AMD's Opteron chips.

"AMD plans to offer the first AMD Opteron processor-based solutions that combine AMD and SeaMicro technology in the second half of 2012. The company remains firmly committed to its traditional server business, and will continue to focus and invest in this area," AMD said in a statement.

SeaMicro's innovations include its supercompute fabric, which connects thousands of processor cores, memory, storage, and input/output traffic. SeaMicro's fabric supports multiple processor instruction sets.

"SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth," said Andrew Feldman, SeaMicro CEO, who will become general manager of AMD's newly created Data Center Server Solutions business.