Intel unimpressed with AMD's SeaMicro buy

Dylan McGrath

March 6, 2012

Dylan McGrath

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel Corp. declined the opportunity to acquire microserver startup SeaMicro Inc. prior to the announcement last week that Intel's chief competitor in the microprocessor market, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., would acquire SeaMicro for $334 million, according to Diane Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager of the company's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group.

Speaking at a press event to launch  Intel's Xeon Processor E5-2600 Product Family here Tuesday (March 6), Bryant said Intel was approached by prior to the AMD deal by executives from SeaMicro, which thus far has brought to market only products with Intel's Atom and Xeon chips.

"We did look at SeaMicro's fabric," Bryant said. "There are probably very few people they didn't come to and shop their technology. We were not impressed. We declined. Very soon after our competitor acquired them.

Bryant said Intel intends to continue to participate strong in the microserver market. Other firms, including Dell, Supermicro, NEC, Hitachi and Tyan, offer microservers based on Intel processors. Bryant said Intel believes it will continue to be the leading processor supplier to microservers.

"We believe we have a very strong roadmap for microservers," Bryant said.