AMD buys into cloud server market with SeaMicro

AMD has purchased cloud micro-server manufacturer Sea Micro for $334 million (211 million) in an attempt to find its place int he ever-booming cloud market.

The chip manufacturer has always come second in the server space against major rival Intel, but hopes the new addition to its portfolio will bolster its position and get more AMD chips into cloud environments.

AMD specifically wants to help companies with web content, social networking, search and video workloads and aims to reduce complexity within the data centre, lower cost and energy consumption and increase performance.

By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator.

"By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data centre leadership position," said Rory Read, president and chief executive (CEO) of AMD.

"The unmatched combination of AMD's processing capabilities, SeaMicro's system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing section of the server market."

SeaMicro claims its servers use only 25 percent of the power of traditional servers, whilst only taking up one sixth of the room in a data centre. It also touts 12 times the bandwidth per core.

Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro CEO, added: "SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth."

"By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market."

Feldman will become general manager a new Data Centre Server Solutions company at AMD to incorporate his firm's technology.