AMD celebrated a successful third-quarter 2020 today with the $35 billion acquisition of FPGA manufacturer Xilinx, which expands the company's technology portfolio as it takes on rival Intel.

"Xilinx is the ideal match for AMD. As the industry's No. 1 provider of FPGAs and adaptive [system on chips], they are the market leader," said AMD CEO Lisa Su on the company's Q3 earnings call. "Together, we'll create the industries high-performance computing leader, and the partner of choice for the largest and most important technology companies."

With the acquisition, AMD is better positioned to counter Intel's FPGA technologies in the data center, which is a space where the chipmaker has already seen strong gains in recent years.

In addition to Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs, Su talked up AMD's expansive technology portfolio, which includes serializer deserializers, high-speed input and output and mixed-signal radio frequency technologies, multi-dimensional silicon integration and packaging, as well as robust software stacks to support them.

Thanks to this portfolio, Xilinx has been able to build "deep strategic partnerships across a diverse set of growing markets," Su said. "In 5G communication, data center, automotive, industrial, aerospace, and defense, Xilinx has established themselves as a strategic technology partner."

Beyond opening the door to new market opportunities for AMD, Su said the acquisition will also accelerate the development of emerging workloads, like artificial intelligence and software-defined infrastructure.

In an article contributed to Forbes, Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, called AMD's acquisition of Xilinx a bold move and ultimately one that makes sense for the company moving forward.

"I believe AMD will continue to organically grow with or without this acquisition, as hopefully evidenced by its monster Q3, its upward guide, and roadmap," he wrote. "I do think AMD has a brighter, long-term future with Xilinx, as it creates a larger entity that is more diversified across different markets and products while leveraging similar technologies."

The deal is expected to close by the end of 2021 and will see Su take over, while Xilinx CEO Victor Peng will join AMD as president of the Xilinx business unit.

Additionally, two Xilinx directors will join the AMD board of directors upon closing.

AMD ended Q3 on a particularly high note posting revenues of $2.8 billion, up 56% year over year. Net income more than doubled during the quarter surging 225% to $390 million during the same period.

According to AMD CFO Devinder Kumar, these revenues were driven in large part by strong growth in the company's consumer Ryzen and server EPYC product lines.

Looking ahead to Q4, AMD expects revenues of $3 billion, up 41% year over year.

The chipmaker's performance and outlook comes in stark contrast to Intel's poor Q3 earnings, which saw that company's net income and revenues tumble nearly 30% and 4%, respectively, year over year.

The acquisition marks the latest high-profile semiconductor acquisition this year. Last month Nvidia announced the $40 billion acquisition of British chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate Softbank.

Meanwhile, Intel last week announced it would sell its NAND flash business to South Korean chipmaker SK hynix for $9 billion.

The acquisitions highlight an undercurrent of increased competition within the semiconductor space.

Arm chipmakers Ampere and Marvell have announced new data center chips designed to go toe to toe with Intel and AMD on price, performance, and power consumption. Just last month, Oracle announced it was deploying Ampere's Altra data center chips in its servers.