Question AMD aquires Pensando

[Thibsie]

AMD Expands Data Center Solutions Capabilities with Acquisition of Pensando

Browse AMD’s company-wide and financial press releases.

ir.amd.com

Anyone knows them ? I certainly dont.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1510952373426003974

 

[sandorski]

Interesting. I wonder if their non-CPU Chip has something to do with it. Adding it to the Epyc line might be the plan. Although having a Complete/Near Complete Cloud solution could permanently keep AMD in the Market and drive more Epyc sales. Perhaps future Epyc processors will be designed specifically to run this particular Software, giving another way to achieve max performance.

 

[Saylick]

STH has a good write up:

AMD Acquires Pensando for its DPU Future

We discuss what is a DPU and why AMD is acquiring Pensando for $1.9B to bring this technology into its data center portfolio

www.servethehome.com

Edit: Just wanted to drop some of my own thoughts here.

Looks like this acquisition is a play to get into the DPU market much quicker than Xilinx could. Pensando already has major cloud vendors as their customers, and their DPUs are more or less analogous to Mellanox's and Intel's offerings. Pensando's biggest pitch is that they are trying to democratize the cloud market, i.e. making it so that small time businesses can compete against AWS, the 800 lb gorilla, by giving them a competitive DPU and software stack against Nitro. As for DPUs, the differences between companies aren't all that much in my opinion, just choice of processor and data packet processing pipeline. Looks like Pensando uses a P4-based programmable pipeline, which is based on an open source language that was created specifically for data processing, while Mellanox's Bluefield 3 uses what they call DOCA, which I imagine is not open source, i.e. proprietary. ServeTheHome says that Nvidia hopes to position DOCA as the CUDA for DPUs. Intel's Mount Evans SOC also supports the open source P4 pipeline.

It appears that Google is a big supporter of P4, which explains why Intel pushed for its support on their Mt. Evans chips. By and by, AMD is clearly gunning for Intel's slice of the Cloud market with this purchase. Meanwhile, Nvidia are off doing their own thing by having more and more AI/inferencing capability baked into their future DPU chips, not surprisingly.

 

[lightduty]

Anyone knows them ? I certainly dont.

Never hear of them, pensando in portuguese means thinking. A side from that, they may be a specialized team with good results to be bought by AMD.