Microsoft or Intel to buy AMD?

Hot on the heels of the rumor about Silver Lake being interested in buying a 20 percent stake in AMD, there's a new rumor going around about potential suitors for AMD.

Today FUD Zilla claims its anonymous industry sources revealed Microsoft is in serious talks with AMD about buying the company. The site heard talks have been going on for a while and suggests Microsoft could be interested in the Radeon division for its Xbox and adds that a future derivative of Zen may end up in the Surface lineup.

While I would take the news with a grain of salt, with a market cap of $1.44 billion and long-term debt of just over $2 billion, an acquisition of AMD definitely makes more sense than the $2.5 billion Microsoft paid to acquire Minecraft developer Mojang.

FUD Zilla is churning out a lot of unconfirmed rumors though. In the same article, the site suggests the company might be acquired in pieces and even names Intel as a potential suitor. A couple of years ago this would have been unthinkable, but in today's world the broad computing world no longer revolves around AMD and Intel:

Our well informed industry sources suggest that Intel is interested in the acquisition of AMD. Before you blast us with your comments, the world changed a few years back and Intel is not a monopoly anymore. Apple has quite big of a stake with iPads and companies like Samsung have their own SoCs that are used for their tablets and phones. Qualcomm and MediaTek got stronger as well. In this changed world Intel would have a chance to acquire AMD if it really wanted.