AMD said in a statement on Tuesday that the deal would bring together two companies which had complementary product portfolios and customers.

The two firms have a combined team of 13,000 engineers and represent more than US$2.7 billion (A$3.8 billion) of annual R&D investment.

“Our acquisition of Xilinx marks the next leg in our journey to establish AMD as the industry’s high performance computing leader and partner of choice for the largest and most important technology companies in the world,” AMD president and chief executive Dr Lisa Su said.

{laodposition sam08}“This is truly a compelling combination that will create significant value for all stakeholders, including AMD and Xilinx shareholders who will benefit from the future growth and upside potential of the combined company.

"The Xilinx team is one of the strongest in the industry and we are thrilled to welcome them to the AMD family. By combining our world-class engineering teams and deep domain expertise, we will create an industry leader with the vision, talent and scale to define the future of high performance computing.”

Xilinx president and chief executive Victor Peng said: “We are excited to join the AMD family. Our shared cultures of innovation, excellence and collaboration make this an ideal combination. Together, we will lead the new era of high performance and adaptive computing.

“Our leading FPGAs, Adaptive SoCs, accelerator and SmartNIC solutions enable innovation from the cloud, to the edge and end devices. We empower our customers to deploy differentiated platforms to market faster, and with optimal efficiency and performance. Joining together with AMD will help accelerate growth in our data centre business and enable us to pursue a broader customer base across more markets.”

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2021. Until this happens, the companies will remain separate, independent entities.

Dr Su will lead the combined company as chief executive while Peng will join AMD as president responsible for the Xilinx business and strategic growth initiatives.