AMD is seeking to enter more areas of chip design and FPGA technology allows them to bundle their current chipsets with specific targeted capability for more applications.
It will be very interesting to see what they do with there added technology and IP.
Well, when Intel acquired Altera, my hope was that FPGA acceleration would become mainstream and that even regular CPUs may start shipping with FPGA logic units to accelerate specific tasks. Sadly, even after all these years, it seems only some very high-end chips from Intel have such FPGA and CPU hybrid designs (limited to a few Xeons as far as I've seen).
Another hope of mine was that it would be the first step towards abstracting FPGA acceleration into something more modular, easy to use and scalable in a similar way to how the x86/x86-64 instruction set has made CPUs from Intel and AMD virtually interchangeable (at least on a superficial level), and how OpenCV had "cured" the ill that was CUDA which was Nvidia's proprietary GPU compute architecture, bringing GPU compute capabilities to cross between vendors. I personally haven't seen such efforts with FPGAs - perhaps the hardware-specific connection makes it a little difficult and we are still in the infancy of potential CPU + FPGA hybrid processing.
I've heard for years that many large-scale cloud operations have always had interest in virtually anything that can accelerate processing. I just hope that AMD pushes it harder than Intel does, since Intel's not had the best track record as of late with all the speculative execution issues, but also with their retreat from mobile and IoT to some degree ... AMD is definitely in a formidable position when it comes to CPUs at the moment. I'm just so happy that they managed to survive Intel's anti-competitive behaviour for so long and come up with a line of CPUs that really pull their weight whether you're looking for performance, value for money or energy efficiency. Their GPU division is perhaps not quite as successful ... perhaps it is next to see a revival. How the FPGAs will slot into their portfolio is definitely going to be interesting to observe.
I just hope the priorities don't drastically change for Xilinx after the deal. Xilinx has been making some very neat FPGA products and i hope they can continue doing. Under AMD, i would guess the plan would be to use FPGAs more on the server side; hopefully that doesn't take away resources from the embedded use-case FPGAs. Only time will tell. And i agree with what Gough Lui has mentioned above...the Intel acquisition of Altera didn't go as we had hoped.
As it turns out, just recently, AMD patented a hybrid CPU+FPGA architecture which might be enabled by Xilinx technology ... perhaps AMD following a similar path will really cement the hybrid design as a new frontier perhaps to be standardised and leveraged for complex tasks.
