AMD is set to acquire the networking vendor Pensando for around $1.9 billion.
Pensando offers a distributed services platform that includes a fully programmable packet processor and comprehensive software stack that it says accelerates networking, security, storage, and other services for cloud, enterprise, and edge applications.
AMD and Pensando said that its packet processor can be distributed throughout a network to accelerate multiple infrastructure services simultaneously, offloading workloads from the CPU and increasing overall system performance. In real world-cloud deployments, the companies underlined that Pensando’s product demonstrates between 8x and 13x greater performance compared to competitive products.
“We have seen a 40x improvement in overall cloud-based connection related performance. Pensando delivered this in less than 12 months,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure, one of Pensando’s customers. “This partnership has enabled a transformational “limitless networking” shift that will ensure our customers have access to the highest performing products and services they expect from Microsoft Azure.”
Pensando was founded in 2017 and counts on several other high profile customers including IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Goldman Sachs.
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“To build a leading-edge data centre with the best performance, security, flexibility and lowest total cost of ownership requires a wide range of compute engines,” said Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. “All major cloud and OEM customers have adopted EPYC processors to power their data centre offerings. Today, with our acquisition of Pensando, we add a leading distributed services platform to our high-performance CPU, GPU, FPGA and adaptive SoC portfolio.”
As part of the deal, Pensando CEO Prem Jain and the rest of the team will join AMD as part of the Data Centre Solutions Group. It is set to remain focused on executing its product and technology roadmaps, but now with additional scale to accelerate its business and address growing market opportunities across a broader number of customers.
“In less than five years Pensando has assembled a best-in-class engineering team that are experts in building systems together with a rich, deep ecosystem of partners and customers who have currently deployed over 100,000 Pensando platforms into production,” said Jain. “Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our core business and enable us to pursue a much larger customer base across more markets.”
Following the customary closing conditions of the deal, the acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022.
