Sinatech: ATI/AMD Aquisition Agreement Reached: ATI facing a big shake-up

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Doesn’t make much sense. How would AMD acquire ATI by talking to ATI? They should be talking to the majority owners of ATI. For a friendly merger of the companies, AMD, in addition to being on good terms with current ATI management, would need backing from a significant (>1/3) of the outstanding shares and a public offer high enough to win over enough of the rest of the shareholders quickly.

Edit: Yahoo says the float is over 98%, with 7% insider ownership and a bit above 64% held by 184 Institutional & Mutual Fund Owners.

So, those of you who revel in reading ATI financial information: Who are the majority owners and/or how diversified is ATI ownership amongst those 184 'big' ones?
 
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Man, I don't see the need for all the negativity (aside from the massive lack of likelihood given ATI being long time cuddly with Intel)

What pops into my head at the prospect of ATIMD is a PC architecture looking kind of like a souped up xbox360 and thats a very promising possibility.
Imagine a big powerful unified shader GP/Physics/GPU co-processor chip with direct HT link to a multi-core CPU.
There could be inter chip integration & efficiency gains of a type and scale that seperately AMD, Intel, ATI & Nvidia could never achieve.

Of course, if it did wind up with ATI just pumping out low quality IGP chipsets then it would be a bad thing.
 
arrrse said:
Of course, if it did wind up with ATI just pumping out low quality IGP chipsets then it would be a bad thing.
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Hey, if it wound up with ATI just pumping out the best quality IGP chipsets the industry had ever seen then it would be a bad thing, in my book.
 
Just one remark:

if this means, that GPU functionality will be integrated into future CPUs with register level specifications being openly published, that'd be a very great thing.
 
I sorta read sorta scanned through the thread, and I didn't see it mentioned. That doesn't mean it hasn't been brought UP tho, but anyway hehe:

IF the green buys the red, won't that cause the OTHER green to side more with the blue?


Meaning:
Assuming AMD and ATi bunk up together, what will that do with Nvidia, in regards to chipset support and such? NV was a fairly early supporter of the Athlon series, but has progressively started to support Intel more and more. SLI was brought first to Intel for example. Would an AMD-owned ATi cause NV to abandon the Athlon market altogether perhaps?
 
Guden Oden said:
Meaning:
Assuming AMD and ATi bunk up together, what will that do with Nvidia, in regards to chipset support and such? NV was a fairly early supporter of the Athlon series, but has progressively started to support Intel more and more. SLI was brought first to Intel for example. Would an AMD-owned ATi cause NV to abandon the Athlon market altogether perhaps?
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Intel already has chipsets and IGPs (yeah, they suck, but they are market leading by unit count), GPUs are probably too low margin for them to consider good business.

On top of chipsets and IGPs Intel have flash to fill excess fab capacity, AMD hasn't after jettisoning their flash business (Spansion).

Edit: But certainly leaves NV in an interesting spot.

Cheers
 
Would an AMD-owned ATi cause NV to abandon the Athlon market altogether perhaps?
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Of course not, why would it?
The only thing that could do that (& ATI dropping intel market) would be wholesale abandonment of PCIe as well as taking up of different, restricted access, proprietary graphics sockets by both AMD & Intel which neither would be stupid enough to do.
 
arrrse said:
Of course not, why would it?
The only thing that could do that (& ATI dropping intel market) would be wholesale abandonment of PCIe as well as taking up of different, restricted access, proprietary graphics sockets by both AMD & Intel which neither would be stupid enough to do.
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I think he was referring to motherboard chipsets and not GPU's.
 
Well there goes my conroesupport, nice timing. Absolutly not happy with this....and so there came only two words...
 
AMD Shares Continue to Slide After Analyst Dismisses ATI Purchase Rumors

AMD Shares Continue to Slide After Analyst Dismisses ATI Purchase Rumors
The stock may have gotten an additional kick down after Credit Suisse analyst Michael Masdea dismissed market rumors that AMD may acquire graphic chips maker ATI Technologies Inc., and called the notion "misguided."

"While speculation has been around for some time that AMD will acquire ATI Technologies, and while recent press articles have been adding fuel to the fire, we believe the negative effects of such a transaction outweigh the positive effects," Masdea wrote in a note.

Masdea further noted that an acquisition of ATI could pose a risk to AMD's current relationship with graphic chips maker Nvidia Corp.

"We believe the Nvidia partnership is critical to establish AMD's beachhead at the high-end, which doesn't drive material volumes, but helps with marketing (brand and performance). Acquiring ATI Technologies would put that relationship at serious risk.
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Why everyone think it - AMD/ATI merger - would be a death-sentence to 3D? While it's highly unlikely to happen, think about the quote above. It says NV wouldn't be too happy with it. Why?

Instead of fabbing out chips from TSMC, Chartered, etc., ATI will have an access to much more advanced manufacturing technology. AMD wouldn't have capacity? I doubt the high-end graphics chips sales are anywhere near the volume of CPU sales. AMD can just share a fraction of fab space with ATI's high-end chips and could still get by with it. Especially once Fab36 runs in full force.

This means, when NV'd be designing chips w/ 90nm or 80nm, ATI would have 65nm for their designs. When TSMC finally catched up with AMD/Intel's current manufacturing (say, 65nm), ATI would be one step ahead with AMD (say, 45nm). Mid-to-low level GPUs can still be outsourced from any of those fabbing houses.

This would put a tremendous pressure on NV and would eventually force NV to build its own fabs. (which would take lots of money and time) In the meantime, this would give ATI a great chance to gain its marketshare.

Of course like someone mentioned, this is a short-term scenario. (say, 1~3 years at most) After that, no one knows where industry would go. But again for this short term, I can't see Intel and NV co-op to fight against AMD-ATI Corp. Intel will be, well, always Intel so they don't need anyone's help other than.. Apple (lol) to keep MS/Dell in check. The biggest fire would be on NV's feet.
 
I also think Intel's new Conroe chipset (P965) not supporting CrossFire is a warning on ATI regarding the rumoured merger. Recent Intel chipsets all natively supported CF via internal PCI-E switch. With P965, Intel seems to have locked the primary PEG @x16 width, leaving the secondary PEG @x4. (Previous chipsets allowed x8/x8 configuration)

With a PCI-E x4 slot, anything above X1600 will be hindered by the lack of bandwidth.
 
Threatening to take over a notable chipset partner wouldn't hep AMD longterm I would have thought.

AMD would be better off looking @ someone like Ageia.

With dual core processor's not becoming the norm. How long before CPU/PPU cores merge?

It would certainly give AMD a boost over Intel and still guarantee chipset support.
 
What PPU/CPU merge? PPU is just a derivate of a CPU, nothing to "merge" there. They go multicore, that's the merging already happening. "PPU" will be gone rather sooner than later.
 
AMD looks to focus on volume and share rather than margins under a year and they have as expected countined progress with server and mobile focus then on the desktop.

Could also be a testmeter how the shareholders feels, AMD shares minus 5 billion with the latest forecast and Intels garbage dumping + ATI merge rumour.
 
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