While the gang does some sleuthing about the current signs of the end of the world; not simply cats and dogs living together but rumours of AMD and Intel working together, lets look at a different surprise. It seems that Broadcom have set its sights on Qualcomm, offering $130 billion to buy out the company and its assets. In part this might be inspired by Qualcomm's pending release of the Centriq family of processors seeing as how Broadcom cancelled their ARM based server chip development earlier this year. It sems as though Qualcomm is not looking too hard at this as a way to pay their ever expanding legal bills in their cases against Apple as according to the story that Slashdot has linked to, Qualcomm considers this an offer it can refuse.
Keep an eye out for an update as Josh and Ryan check on the mixing of Intel's Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridges and AMD's Polaris.
"Chipmaker Broadcom officially unveiled a $130bn offer, including net debt, for Qualcomm on Monday, in what could be the largest tech deal in history. Under Broadcom's proposal, Qualcomm shareholders would receive $70 per share — $60 in cash and $10 in shares of its rival. It would value Qualcomm's equity at roughly $103bn."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Intel and AMD partner on new 8th-gen CPUs to challenge Nvidia @ The Inquirer
- Essen 2017: Best board games from the biggest board game convention @ Ars Technica
- Biggest Tor overhaul in a decade adds layers of security improvements @ The Register
- 'Qualcomm, we will buy you… for… one HUNDRED… BILLION DOLLARS' – Broadcom @ The Register
- Take off, ya hosers! Silicon Valley court says Google can safely ignore Canadian search ban @ The Register
Woah! That AMD/Intel
Woah! That AMD/Intel collaboration article just blew my mind. Most “shocking” things don’t really surprise me, but I looked high and low for signs that this was a recycled April Fools joke that someone picked up on.
Ha ha Intel tastes its own
Ha ha Intel tastes its own dogfood graphics and buys some AMD dies to drop onto its Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridges based MCM. That whole thing is just a nano motherboard arrangement on that MCM with the EMIB used to connect the Radeon GPU with the HBM2 with the other traces run in a less dense manner through the organic substrate(Plastic/resin) part of the substrate. So Intel embeds a smaller strip like silicon interposer in that mostly resin based substrate only where the higher dinsity silicon traces are needed between the Radeon GPU Die and the HBM2 die stack and Intel’s fixed its graphics woes where the Radeon Die and HBM2 stack Goes. No worries about OEM’s only providing a single channel to regular DRAM because the GPU uses it own HBM2 VRAM, but the Intel/Radeon(Polaris) mashup on that MCM nano motherboard will not have any HBCC IP like Vega does.
So AMD can still one up that design with a Zen based APU system on an interposer also! And that all AMD design will support the Infinity Fabric instead of PCIe with the Zen cores die a little bit more connected up coherently with the Vega DIE and its nCUs and HBM2 stack/s. That Infinity Fabric on Zen and Vega has a little more cache coherency Zen core to Vega GPU die than Intel’s solution using a GPU die and PCIe traces in a Motherboard style arangement on that EMIB based MCM module.
I’ll wait and see what AMD’s Zen/Vega/HBM2 workstation grade APUs on an Interposer module will be like, with maybe the silicon interposer being etched with an entire Infinity Fabric’s traces and active circuitry. Navi is supposed to be Vega+ with a modular GPU chiplet design so the silicon interposer could be of an active design with both traces and transistors, enough to contain the entire Infinity Fabric based data fabric and seperate control fabric. AMD still has some new designs to come online for the workstation market in 2018.
I always thought Qualcomm was too big to be eaten but looking at Apple’s cash stash that is bigger than Both AMD’s and Intel’s market Caps combined has changed my view on that subject. Those Qualcomm share holders do have their price and Broadcom’s single m may just be doubled enough to eat that double mm like candy at a higher price. The regulatory folks woud still have to approve any purchase of Qualcomm by Broadcom and that’s a long process also.