I feel AMD could address any of those shortcomings with partnerships/licensing, the likes of which they have with Cray for Supercomputers for example. AMD have the key IPs, i.e. GPU and CPU, unlike Nvidia, who's only option to get an entry to the market is to purchase ARM.
AMD has opted for that model, although it's obligatory rather than optional like it is for the more vertically integrated competition.
This can be more efficient in terms of making certain IP choices possible without taking AMD out of its core competencies and burning limited resources. The question for AMD's value-add is how reliably it can coordinate a competitive bundle of IPs while also projecting certainty to current and future customers that they will be able to provide a consistent mix or roadmap going forward. A perennial threat for putting together a mixed product or promising continuity into future generations is the question of "what if your partner is acquired?" in an increasingly consolidated industry. Coordination and logistics are also a possible source of inefficiency, since even within AMD there is a chronic lag between GPU and CPU IP for its APUs and multiple instance of missing critical shopping windows.
This would be part of a buy-in question as well for any partners into whatever scheme AMD wants to use. AMD's hinted at a vision of extending its dis-integration strategy into creating chiplets that can serve as application specific standard products, which would need a physical standard and interoperability with partners and potential customers. If there is no buy-in, the 3D stacks of AMD and hybrid IP would have AMD chiplets and all the other slots painfully vacant.
HSA would be an example of this, and its what happened to it and the partners within it seem illustrative of the threat of separate parties' interests diverging or individual members failing/being acquired.
That HSA found significantly more activity in its dwindling years in China highlights a problem given the rise in political brinksmanship over IP. Partners could be spontaneously walled off by a trade dispute from AMD at any time.
Now that Nvidia is attempting to purchase ARM, it could be buying into an increasingly credible alternative to x86 in some fields, and a stronghold in other markets that AMD would be even less able to get into.
AMD also has a certain amount of its IP dependent on ARM cores or ARM platform elements like TrustZone, and it might be worth keeping an eye on what licensing or legal games could be played in the future.
Even if the ARM acquisition winds up hurting ARM and Nvidia, it may do so by incentivizing something like RISCV, particularly with markets or customers that have limited ties to AMD products already. The aforementioned trade wars could mean looking for something in-house, in-country, or otherwise separate from an AMD product that could be blocked by one government or the other.
AMD still does not invest in R&D to the scale of Intel or Nvidia and are probably better off focusing their resources towards the key GPU and CPU IPs. The addressable market is big enough without them having to look to other segments.
AMD has stated its desire to expand, and its addressable market may have increasing competition. If AMD only optimizes what it already serves, the extent of it that is sufficiently served just by CPU and GPU IP is not a certain growth prospect.
Apple's apparent direction of using in-house CPU and GPU IP for all but perhaps professional products could mark the end of Apple's investment in tweaked version of AMD's GPUs, which have been a consistent part of AMD's GPU portfolio for years. I cannot predict what Apple's ambitions are for the highest tier, but it's a diminished prospect for AMD in terms of graphics or any possible chance for its CPUs.
The consoles are the primary semi-custom market, but that's probably a mature market. Sony may be the most reliant on AMD's hardware, and in-line with what AMD's product offerings permit. That's one customer, and I'm not sure it can expand that much going forward because it's already successful in its market and its offerings are somewhat iffy outside of the console itself. Microsoft's broader platform strategy de-emphasizes semi-custom to some extent and could just as readily empower Intel or Nvidia.
Why Microsoft is doing this, and why it's purchasing swaths of the game developer market, is consolidation and the movement of other large vertically integrated platforms into the streaming and game markets: Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc.
Streaming or other forms of server-based service could use AMD hardware, just as those vendors could use AMD hardware for other purposes in their instances. However, those services also start to care about what can be optimized in the rest of the system or datacenter, so things like software-defined networking, or AI, or FPGAs. Intel or Nvidia can have value-add there, and those customers themselves are buying AMD's potential partners or moving to carve out parts of AMD's market for themselves.
So AMD may want to have something to offer other than a CPU or GPU only. Also, for various markets, AMD lacks the expertise, ecosystem, or history for any customer to take a chance on them, like automotive or telecom. Xilinx would have the credibility, and value-add--presuming its development pipeline isn't hiding hiccups.
True, though LBOs in the semiconductor are a lot more complex due to the nature of the industry demanding significant R&D spend. Aside from Broadcom and Avago, I can't recall many other big ones.
If the concern is the long-term health of the company, that may be so. It's best not to have enough assets and cash on hand that it could pay for an immediate fire-sale.
Yes the timing of the ATI purchase was just unfortunate for AMD. They'd have probably paid a third if they'd waited a year. Oh how things have might been if they hadn't completely hamstrung themselves for a few years thanks to that.
I think it was claimed that Intel helped create the impression they were looking to acquire ATI for that exact outcome, and a bidding war against a phantom offering was something ATI would have wanted to encourage.
AMD went and did this to ATIC when they created the impression that other parties wanted to buy AMD's fabs.