AMD is renowned for being one of the innovators in the chip business and is also involved in operating data centers. As AMD grows, maximizing efficiency and performance for its workloads becomes more significant. AMD has just announced that it intends to acquire chip and data center optimization startup Pensando Systems Inc. for $1.9 billion
So what is Pensando? The company was founded in 2017 by a group of 4 ex-Cisco Systems Inc. engineers. Pensando is one of several vendors competing in the emerging data processing unit (DPU) market. They make fully programmable processors with a software platform that helps enterprise clients and data center customers to function more like cloud computing data centers like Amazon’s Amazon Web Services. Through Pensando’s platform, they are able to distribute throughout its network in accelerating multiple infrastructure services more efficiently. This helps processes from the CPU offload and thus increasing overall system performance. Pensando already has large enterprises as customers with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
Pensando’s platform has a programmable packet processor that can be distributed throughout a network to efficiently accelerate multiple infrastructure services simultaneously, offloading workloads from the CPU and increasing overall system performance.
The acquisition of Pensando by AMD is all in the effort of increasing its share in the data center market and will get AMD into the NPU or IPU market as it goes up against the likes of NVIDIA’s and Intel’s data-center chip packages. AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su gave the following statement.
“Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio. The Pensando team brings world-class expertise and a proven track record of innovation at the chip, software and platform level,”
