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April 17, 2015

AMD Pulls the Plug on SeaMicro

by Jim Turley

One-third of a billion dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to. AMD acquired SeaMicro in 2012 for $334 million, hoping to jump into the hot (at the time) market for “microservers,” machines that use a lot of small microprocessors instead of just a few big ones. Now, AMD has killed off the entire product line and reassigned the staff.

SeaMicro wasn’t one of the many ARM-based server startups. Instead, it used small x86 processors to make its microservers, an obvious selling point for AMD. Nevertheless, AMD is moving forward with its ARM-based server chips, including the upcoming Opteron A1100. But SeaMicro’s x86 machines never seemed to catch fire, and decided to pull the plug.

The announcement came abruptly, in the midst of the company’s quarterly financial earnings report. There was zero notice, at least to outsiders. The SeaMicro website now has just a single page, with one link to contact tech support. Good luck with that.

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