AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced during its earnings call Thursday that it was discontinuing its SeaMicro microserver business.
AMD originally acquired the company in 2012 for $334 million. Originally SeaMicro’s ultradense microservers were powered by Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Atom processors, but after the acquisition the company switched to Opteron. Company founder Andrew Feldman, who originally ran the microserver division inside AMD, left the company during a reorganization in early 2014.
The company’s only product it released under AMD was the SM15000, which was offered with either an AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processor. Unfortunately for AMD, many of the biggest wins for SeaMicro were from servers powered by Xeons and not Opterons.
Back when AMD acquired SeaMicro, the division was supposed to turn AMD into a force to be reckoned with in the server market. Not against traditional major players, but for a new market of low-cost, low-power servers. These would line the racks of server farms that power the datacenters for the next billion Internet users.
But despite the promise the division held, things just never materialized for SeaMicro and AMD. AMD will retain SeaMicro’s server fabric IP, but it’s unclear if AMD will want to find a buyer for it.
