The market is not for. NVIDIA fights to take over ARM, instead, AMD just formally bought Xilinx after permission from China, but between so much paperwork and monetary policy there is a series of clauses that have just come to light and that forces Lisa Su to manufacture products for the Asian country and thus skip the restrictions of USA. What’s going on?
The curious thing about this operation between AMD and Xilinx is that it had already been done since 2020 and had an end date for the end of last year. In the most absolute silence, a coup was being perpetrated by the Asian giant against its rival for technological supremacy, where after months of deliberations and agreements we now know part of the details of said treaty.
AMD is already the fourth IC designer in the world thanks to China
With the merger that took place in secret in October 2021, AMD is already currently the fourth integrated circuit designer in the world, surpassing Intel along the way and where it only has nothing less than NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Broadcomm. The shares rose last year pushed by investors aware of the agreement by we do not know what internal sources and where the fruits are now seen, which have important conditions.
The first of these requires AMD to guarantee that there will be no products or product bundles that have to be purchased by Xilinx or its customers, while at the same time the merged entity (Xilinx) is prohibited from doing the same with AMD. In this way neither processors, nor GPU, SoC or FPGA can be the subject of internal agreements between both or with clients of one and the other.
But there’s also another part of China’s agreement and permission with AMD and Xilinx that go straight to bypassing the US chip design and procurement ban, which is very interesting.
The purchase of NVIDIA over ARM will condition the position among superpowers
The deal includes AMD and Xilinx products being compatible with the ARM instruction set, which would leave the US unable to bar Lisa Su’s from supplying chips to China based on any Chinese ISA. At the same time, if NVIDIA finally bought ARM, it could not prohibit it from doing such shipments because then AMD would be banned from China.
Therefore, the purchase of NVIDIA from ARM has become crucial for the United States, since it could not veto, but it could control what would reach the Asian market and thus could slow down companies like Xiaomi in favor of Apple and of course that Huawei does not take more power, among many other chip design and manufacturing companies.
The world stage moves again where Intel seems to be left out, but this is not objective, since in FPGA it is, if not the leader, one of them and it is also offering better and better performance per watt if leaving aside the ISA x86, so really ARM has a very tough competitor that is taking off now and that has already surpassed its maximum exponent under these instructions: Apple.
