Stefan Mileschin

AMD has announced that it is closing the dense server system business – operating under the SeaMicro brand.

SeaMicro was bought in 2012 for $334 million and was fairly controversial.

AMD wanted to be a bit more agile and take a big chunk of what was expected to be a fast-growing market micro/dense server market.

The technology mapped well to AMD’s processor designs, where both the Bulldozer and Cat families would be well suited for such a design, not to mention AMD’s future ARM based CPUs.

SeaMicro’s first product post-acquisition was the SM15000, a dense server design announced in late 2012 that offered either AMD “Piledriver” Opterons or Intel “Ivy Bridge” Xeon CPUs.

But SeaMicro did not release any additional products prior to the announcement from AMD.

Now AMD is trying to find a solid foothold as a semi-custom silicon company and SeaMicro business no longer fits.

But it does seem strange, partly because AMD did not try to sell SeaMicro off first and secondly because AMD’s first ARM processors were set to ship this year. The Opteron A1100 would have played rather nicely with SeaMicro servers. But it seems that the A1100 is behind schedule and it is not worth keeping SeaMicro running.

http://www.techeye.net/business/amd-scuttles-seamicro