Legendary dual GPU “umbilical cord” manufacturer bought off

Apr 30, 2012 23:44 GMT  ·  By

California, San Jose-headquartered company Integrated Device Technology, Inc. has just announced it would be acquiring Sunnyvale-based PLX Technologies. PLX Technologies is a PCI and PCIe master that powers many AMD dual GPU cards like the Radeon HD 4870 x 2 and the Radeon HD 5970.

The latest dual GPU card that uses PLX technology is Nvidia’s recently launched GeForce GTX 690 that we've already presented here.

This move follows an entire decade of technology acquisitions for IDT.

IDT acquired Integrated Circuit Systems (ICS) for about $1.7 billion in cash and stock back in 2005 and then acquired the PC Audio division of Texas-based company SigmaTel for $80 million in July the following year.

In October 2008, IDT purchased the video processing technology and some other assets from Silicon Optix, including the Hollywood Quality Video brand and the Reon product line and then, three years later, together with Qualcomm, it announced the signing of an agreement to transfer IDT’s Hollywood Quality Video and Frame Rate Conversion Video Processing product lines to Qualcomm.

The total transaction value is approximately $330 million, but only half of this will be cash, and the rest will be IDT stock. This means that IDT pays around 7 USD per PLX share, but the PLX shareholders will receive only 3.5 USD in cash and the rest will be IDT stock.

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Nvidia's GeForce GTX 690 Dual GPU vide card with two GK104 GPUs flanking a PLX CIe 3.0 bridge chip
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