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Timing wise, the deal presents an interesting contrast, coming just a week after Intel announced its plans to divest its NAND memory chip business.
But don't read Intel's spinoff of NAND chips — a low margin, commodity business — as a sign of Intel and AMD moving in opposite directions. Intel is betting big on programmable chips too: It acquired Altera, the other big player in the market, five years ago for less than half the price AMD paid for Xilinx.
FWIW: There's one notable player left in the programmable chips business: Lattice Semiconductor, a much smaller company that reported better-than-expected Q3 results on Tuesday.
As AMD CEO Lisa Su told the Wall Street Journal, the acquisition is about size."When you look at where the markets are going in the future, I think scale matters," she said.
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The deal could represent a transformative moment for AMD: After a lifetime of playing the role of a "second source" provider for the Intel x86 microprocessors used by PC makers, AMD now has a chance to level the playing field with its archrival in the critical data center market.
Next up: Super Thursday! That's when Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, and Twitter will all give their Q3 report cards. We'll be covering all the action on the Business Insider site.
The DOJ wants to curtail Google's search dominance, arguing that Google's deal with Apple (among other things) has unfairly thwarted rival internet search engines like Microsoft's hapless Bing and the ever-plucky DuckDuckGo.
But there's another search box that's giving Google a run for the money: Amazon's product search. As Eugene Kim reveals in his latest scoop, Amazon has big plans for its search bar, where roughly 60% of online shoppers begin their searches. According to internal documents obtained by Kim, Amazon expects its search bar to generate $8.8 billion in indirect sales this year thanks to a slew of enhancements including:
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Autocomplete enhancements have been tested that bring up product images, or recommend Prime-eligible products.
"Mission awareness search": If a user has searched for cameras in the past, Amazon's autocomplete will show results for Nikon when a user types the letter N into the search box.
Augmented reality, such as a feature that allows users to search for a product by uploading a photo, is expected to be used for 10 million searches in 2020, compared to just 370,000 last year.
Of Quibi and Coinbase...
Two of the most fascinating stories in tech recently involve the demise of Quibi, the video streaming app led by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, and the ruckus at Coinbase, a high-flying cryptocurrency startup whose CEO compelled 5% of staff to head for the exits.
We've got features on both of these to get you up to speed:
Business Insider spoke with 11 Coinbase insiders who had direct dealings with CEO and cofounder Brian Armstrong to determine what it's like to work at Coinbase and for him.
They say when you're a hammer that everything looks like a nail. The updated version may be, when you're a video game company everything looks like a console.
Meanwhile, Atari is getting into the hotel game. The first Atari hotels are slated for Las Vegas and Phoenix. The artistic renderings released this month show a sleek, futuristic building whose design is somewhat reminiscent of a PlayStation 2 console. Maybe this hotel is a giant concrete-and-steel teaser to introduce Atari's first new gaming home console in decades. You heard it here first!
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Facebook, Twitter and YouTube's business models could get crushed if a law called Section 230 gets repealed. Trump and Congress are rushing to do exactly that.
Apple is quietly building a search rival to Google ahead of the DOJ's landmark antitrust case, according to a report
Joe Rogan hosts far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Spotify podcast 2 years after Jones was kicked off the platform