AMD finds itself in the increasing novel situation – sorta like Microsoft with its promised Surface tablets – of possibly competing against its OEMs with a system – and not just a box with Intel chips in it – which is novel enough, imagine AMD selling Intel chips – but a complete plug-and-play system with scads of external storage that it’s building itself.
It’s the first time AMD has gone into the storage business and it owes this little adventure in vertical integration to its $334 million acquisition of micro server maker SeaMicro earlier this year.
SeaMicro builds dense, energy-efficient micro servers that are aimed at the 500 top clouds and Big Data houses. AMD bought SeaMicro out from under Intel in February as a way to backstroke out of its evaporating PC pool.
Ironically it was Intel that predicted that micro servers would claim 10% of the server market by 2015.