Advanced Micro Devices and SeaMicro on Thursday fired back at an Intel executive who earlier in the week claimed Intel passed on acquiring SeaMicro because the chip giant wasn't impressed with the microserver maker's technology.
SeaMicro board member Fred Weber called Diane Bryant's comments "disappointing" and said Bryant, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center and Connected Systems Group, "has gotten a little ahead of herself truth-wise."
AMD announced a bid last week to acquire SeaMicro for $334 million. The startup makes microservers based on Intel's Atom processors and also owns highly regarded data center fabric technologies.
The narrative ahead of AMD's announcement of the acquisition suggested that SeaMicro was eagerly courted by several other companies, including Intel, and that AMD pulled off a coup by snatching up the startup ahead of its rivals.
Not so, said Bryant during a press event in San Francisco where Intel earlier this week launched its new Xeon E5-2600 family of server and workstation processors.
"We were not impressed with the technology," she said, in response to a question about the AMD-SeaMicro deal.
Weber was not shy about rebutting Bryant's characterization of how events played out.
"I think she has gotten a bit ahead of herself truth wise," he said in a statement sent to PCMag by SeaMicro on Thursday. "It is disappointing since all the interactions between SeaMicro and Intel executives to date have been professional, constructive and mutually beneficial. It had left me with a very positive impression of Intel."
"[But] the integrated data-center server combining networking, storage, cloud level processing and virtualization and enabling new levels of density and power efficiency will be the battle ground of the next decade, so I suppose the stakes are unusually high," he continued.
A SeaMicro spokesperson also sent along a list of claims about the SeaMicro-Intel relationship that she said countered Bryant's contention that Intel wasn't impressed with the smaller company's technology, including claims that Intel "incorporated features into its roadmap at SeaMicro's request ... organized and facilitated numerous meetings with [SeaMicro] senior executives and participation in its own events, including a joint press conference just over a month ago ... [and] at no time did a SeaMicro executive, employee, agent, banker, approach Intel about selling SeaMicro to [Intel]."
A war of words involving Intel and AMD in the same week that there was a collective freak-out over obscure graphics benchmarking claims? It may be a post-PC world but right now it feels like 2007 all over again.