AMD cements its entry in the cloud server business, buying microserver specialist SeaMicro for around $334 million.
SeaMicro builds space- and energy-saving servers by using hundreds of "wimpy cores"-- ultra-low-power processors-- specifically Intel chips, including Atom and Xeon processors. The company will continue making servers using Intel chips (for now) before it transitions towards AMD-based solutions sometime around H2 2012.
AMD also hopes to license SeaMicro "supercompute fabric" technology (the means connecting 1000s of processor cores, memory, storage and input/output traffic) to other server makers like Dell and HP. The technology supports multiple processor instruction sets, and already has various deployments around the world.
AMD will also continue servicing current SeaMicro customers.
SeaMicro employs 80 people, including founder and CTO Gary Lauterbach-- ex-AMD fellow and architect on the AMD Opteron processor core.