When AMD bought Seamicro we knew that they would have to continue to offer Intel CPUs inside new products for a while. There would be no graceful way to remove Intel from the picture. AMD was well aware of this, but also saw the potential for other products using their own CPUs. We also have a feeling that AMD might decide to work closely with Qualcomm or perhaps Samsung one an ARM based server for Seamicro as well. These moves make sense with Rory Reed’s vision of the cloud. Seamicro has some exceptionally impressive servers that are ideal for cloud based systems.

Typically your computing nodes and storage are separated into discrete devices with Seamicro’s new servers you can combine these into a single unit making them much more efficient. At the core of all of this is Seamicro’s Freedom Fabric which enables the combination. As Andrew Feldman said when AMD announced the acquisition of Seamicro: “When you're talking about the ability to tie together large amounts of processor cores, hundreds and even thousands, within a server system, there aren't a lot of choices out there [in terms of competitors], particularly if you want to bring Ethernet over it and disk traffic over it, there's just us,”

So while we are savoring the irony of AMD selling an Intel powered line of servers we are also admiring how the pieces to Rory Reed’s cloud vision are coming together. AMD has a ways to go before the rest of the puzzle pieces are in place and we expect to see them have a few rough quarters ahead as they will have to invest more money to pull everything off, but by the end of 2013 they should be in a position to compete well in the data center with some of their products and also on the tablet front. We expect AMD to push their server CPUs into new Seamicro servers fairly soon and while AMD might be late to the tablet party, they can put together an impressive product if they can get the right people to listen. The next 14-18 months should be very interesting to watch for AMD.

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