Oracle Looks for Chipmakers to Acquire

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Analyst seem to think that, of the chipmakers Oracle might buy, AMD might be prime a target for acquisition. There hasn’t been any news since this story broke over the weekend and AMD’s Drew Prairie said the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation.

Oracle may buy a semiconductor company with technology for servers, said Doug Freedman, an analyst at Gleacher & Co. in San Francisco. Potential targets include AMD, IBM Corp.'s chip division and Nvidia Corp., he said. "You've got to think it's focused on enterprise hardware, on the server," he said. "AMD jumps off the screen."
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interesting - I'll move over to intel then because they will continue to support desktop chips and probably gaming too, AMD owned by Ellison will just make servers and such.
 
Doesn't sound healthy for gamers if Oracle buy AMD or Nvidia as they don't really care about graphics - only big database servers. Lots of cpu/gpu compute but no games :(
 
F*&% Oracle!
I was waiting for Tony Stark to sock Ellison in the jaw in Ironman2. Sadly it did not happen.
 
I don't really see it happening; didn't they just stop selling AMD boxes? They're all Intel and SPARC now...
 
oh, wonderful, another company for Oracle to ruin just like they ruined Sun. I hope AMD fights it if they do propose buying them out. getting bought by Oracle is just like getting bought out by Comcast. they have about the same level of reliability and service.
 
Fujitsu's SPARC division would make sense, but if they: "want to play in every important industry", then Via, Transmeta, ARM and AMD would all make some sense. Then again, maybe buying Tilera would make sense we well.
 
Besides, if Oracle bought AMD, would they just stop development of all their processors that weren't servers? I doubt they would want to get their hands into the consumer market. And from what I recall, they are putting a lot of money into making the SPARC processors better. Plus AMD seems like it would be a really pricey acquisition. Nvidia almost makes more sense since they are smaller and have really been promoting GPGPU computing. But I have no idea if GPGPU computing is any good for database work.
 
dgingeri said:
oh, wonderful, another company for Oracle to ruin just like they ruined Sun. I hope AMD fights it if they do propose buying them out. getting bought by Oracle is just like getting bought out by Comcast. they have about the same level of reliability and service.
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Sun was already ruined by the time Oracle bought them.
 
I'm not a chip guru by any stretch but hasn't development of SPARC essentially stopped for a number of years? At one point they had a significant advantage over x86 based chips in speed/performance but that has long past.
 
If Oracle buys ATI, that will be the end of the Radeon.

Oracle is way too full of stuffed-business suits to even consider keeping a graphics card line.
 
It would cost more to buy out Nvidia than it would to buy out AMD. Even though AMD is the larger of the two companies.
 
PiratePowWow said:
It would cost more to buy out Nvidia than it would to buy out AMD. Even though AMD is the larger of the two companies.
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NVIDIA's market cap is $6.8 billion.
AMD's market cap is $4.9 billion.
NVIDIA does have a much higher P/E ratio, so you mean that AMD is larger in terms of revenue.
 
JayteeBates said:
I'm not a chip guru by any stretch but hasn't development of SPARC essentially stopped for a number of years? At one point they had a significant advantage over x86 based chips in speed/performance but that has long past.
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The most recent SPARC came out on the 20th of this month, it's a monster with 8 cores and 16way per core hyperthreading for a total of 128 threads per chip. They've been doing one or two variants a year for the last few. The core architecture (which I assume means instructionset) hasn't changed much in years; but going from single core single thread to many core crazy threads is a major shift

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#History
 
AMD has been losing money for a while now even though they have great hardware; perhaps ellison could grab them up for a bargain. All I know is I'd be interested from the buisness side of this to see what happens and scared also because of what might happen to Intel's only legit competitor, wouldn't the FTC come down hard on Oracle if they stopped marketing chips that compete with intel as that would give intel a huge monopoly?
 
The company is selling customers more high-end computer systems that contain computing power, storage, networking and software designed to work together. Oracle introduced two such systems this week: Exalogic and a new version of its Exadata computer.

"I would be stunned if 10 years from now, most data centers didn't rely on these engineered systems," Ellison said. "We're betting that this is the future of computing."
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Sort of shoots the notion of "cloud computing" in the head.
 
TechLarry said:
If Oracle buys ATI, that will be the end of the Radeon.

Oracle is way too full of stuffed-business suits to even consider keeping a graphics card line.
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Despite the upcoming rebranding to AMD-only, I don't think the ATI and AMD divisions are so intermeshed that graphics couldn't be spun off to another buyer. Makes taking over AMD that much cheaper and allows Oracle to focus on server hardware.

PiratePowWow said:
It would cost more to buy out Nvidia than it would to buy out AMD. Even though AMD is the larger of the two companies.
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Rational Egoist said:
NVIDIA's market cap is $6.8 billion.
AMD's market cap is $4.9 billion.
NVIDIA does have a much higher P/E ratio, so you mean that AMD is larger in terms of revenue.
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AMD is cheaper to buy outright: $4.9B to buy all the shares and then you get the $1.9B that they have in cash. Total price: $3B
(vs. NVDA: $6.82B - $1.77B = $5.05B)

Based on current earnings, it would theoretically take 2.4 years to pay off the cost of buying AMD. Compare that to 21.5 years for NVDA.

AMD is definitely the better value. (Of course, we all know AMD's earning success lately is due to the ATI line, so if Oracle sells it, all bets are off... except for the bet about Oracle buying AMD in the first place, natch.)
 
srangara said:
AMD is cheaper to buy outright: $4.9B to buy all the shares and then you get the $1.9B that they have in cash. Total price: $3B
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AMD have $1.9B cash - I think you mean debt don't you? Nvidia has cash in the bank, AMD's debt was so great they were likely to go under if intel hadn't given them a billion.
 
DanNeely said:
The most recent SPARC came out on the 20th of this month, it's a monster with 8 cores and 16way per core hyperthreading for a total of 128 threads per chip. They've been doing one or two variants a year for the last few. The core architecture (which I assume means instructionset) hasn't changed much in years; but going from single core single thread to many core crazy threads is a major shift

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#History
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Interesting - was unaware they were still being developed. Good for server usage I am sure but the applications would have to be compiled for SPARC. That's probably why I haven't heard much about it as I can't think of any software written for SPARC lately.
 
sbuckler said:
AMD have $1.9B cash - I think you mean debt don't you? Nvidia has cash in the bank, AMD's debt was so great they were likely to go under if intel hadn't given them a billion.
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Ah, this is true. AMD buyers would inherit a great deal of debt. At least you don't have to pay that out right away.

Adding debt back in, though, gives you a net cost of buying AMD (including baggage) of $4.9B - $1.9B + $2.58B = $5.58B (vs. NVDA = $5.07B). AMD is still the better bargain, given earnings, but we all know earnings can change on a dime.

Key Statistics:
AMD: http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AMD
Total Cash: 1.9B
Total Debt: 2.58B

NVDA: http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=NVDA
Total Cash: 1.77B
Total Debt: 23.7M

Balance Sheets:
AMD: http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=AMD&annual
NVDA: http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=NVDA&annual
 
Yea, but it's not as simple as buying all the outstanding shares of AMD. Is it? I mean, just because a company is public doesn't mean 100% of the company is available to be purchased in shares. I mean pretty company's will sometimes just issue about 40% of a company as shares, and later on they can issue more shares of the company as stock if they need more cash. I could be wrong, but I am thinking it is more completed than just looking at the number of shares on yahoo.
 
im not sure how AMD is setup but I'm sure the board of directors would have to approve it, the FTC would have to look at it, and all sorts of things. What if AMD and Nvidia merged? That'd be interesting, perhaps w could see a fermi-fusion-x86 monstrosity with some of the good of the ati gfx chips.
 
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