AMD acquired both Xilinx [$49 billion] and Pensando [$1.9 billion] in 2022, and according to Ruth Cotter – SVP overseeing marketing, human resources, and investor relations of the expanding enterprise – the acquisitions have been driving successful innovation and diversity.

The expansion marks AMD's efforts to use its 5G network processor support to tap further into sectors like data centers, embedded computing, and telecom.

In light of Broadcom's pending acquisition of VMware, prompting a trio of top executives to leave the latter company, analysts have expressed concern over Broadcom’s traditionally heavy hand in past acquisitions potentially hamstringing VMware’s innovation. “For acquired companies, a Broadcom acquisition sparks fear of price hikes, diminished support, and stunted innovation,” Forrester Senior Analyst Tracy Woo bluntly stated in a report.

But Cotter’s experience leading AMD's two acquisitions this year – growing a once smaller company into one with an employee base akin to Broadcom – yields a contrastingly optimistic paradigm.

“We brought 5,000 people into AMD at the same time – in parallel with us hiring that many people organically ourselves. So we went from 15,000 people to 25,000 people overnight between our own hiring and Xilinx joining us,” she told SDxCentral.

For the past five years, AMD has been a smaller player in the marketplace, “second to Intel and second to NVIDIA in some ways,” she noted. But Cotter attributes the last five years of growth to a “simplified" and "crisp" company focus on high-performance computing lead by CEO Lisa Su.

Its larger acquisition of Xilinx has been a “behemoth to try and integrate” in the last 10 months, but has ultimately led to a promising marriage of roadmaps to “go really big in AI [artificial intelligence].”

Cotter said Xilinx helped in terms of the technology they brought on board – specifically referencing its field-programmable gate arrays’ (FPGA) many use cases – but also brought in critical revenue streams as a higher-margin enterprise.

Yet the benefit of expanding technological services also presented one of the larger challenges of navigating different design-win cycles and operation structures. She found “the way that work got done [was] quite different because the Xilinx team had a longer runway to get [projects] done, whereas AMD was in this frenetic six-month cycle."

“So that's where we have to spend time to really take a step back and look at how work got done at both companies and then develop best-of-breed where it made sense, [to make] AMD stronger and better moving forward," she continued.

The deal with Pensando, which closed in May, aided in AMD’s data center strategy, according to Cotter, which is one of the company’s focused growth vectors over the next five years. Pensando's DPUs, for instance, represent a broad category of hardware accelerators designed to offload input/output (I/O) intensive workloads, like those associated with networking, storage, and security applications, and are commonly associated with composable infrastructure. While the role these devices serve varies wildly from vendor to vendor, most share a common promise of more efficient resource utilization and reduced operating costs throughout a data center's networking environment.

“They both settled in very nicely,” she remarked, but added that the path to scaling and prioritizing how to bring that employee base along has been an essential focus. “Really having to make sure that our employees stay focused on what's important is key, making sure that we are able to guide and usher them through market challenges like the macro backdrop we're all in right now," she said.