AMD-ATI Merger First Consequence: Ati to Be Renamed AMD

Simple, money. It's all about the shareholders and now that AMD owns ATI they can do whatever they damn well please with it; probably whatever is most profitable such as integrated chipsets and low end graphics.

 

You get no where though if you have no brand name, and part of doing that is also having high performance parts. This is why I'm still very confindent that we'll still continue to see high end cards, etc from AMD/ATi.

 

Yes, but the situation has changed. Intel would have eaten them alive if they hadn't done this. Intel is coming on all fronts with all guns blazing, chipsets, gfx, IGP, multicore CPU's etc. No way could AMD counter this without a strong in-house GFX+chipset+IGP division.

 

To return back to the starting point of this thread (ATI being renamed to AMD), it seems that the news on this front is that there is no news yet.

 

No News is Good News right?

 

Say that isnt so

I hope there will be a R700.

 

Yes with companies that concentrate on a single type of product like ATI and Nvidia but AMD doesn't need it, they are a CPU oriented company. To them the GPU is a second thought.

 

Well, at least I asked

 

Personally, I would suggest its just a simple case of esablishing what is sensible for what market.

 

Considering AMD wasn't a GPU company at all until a few days ago, I think it's a bit premature to determine what they think of GPUs. And since their future slides show Crossfire (4 graphics cards), I doubt they're dropping the high end.

 

I like to think of analysts as nothing more then a respected forum poster. They can still have no idea what they're talking about. Especially when you have a wall street guy talking about computer hardware. Nvidia knows this and hence the comment about ATI throwing in the towel. They're basically feeding off Wall Street's ignorence to boost their share price. Obviously, it's working.

Also, this thread should probably me merged with another one of the AMD-ATI threads.

 

12 to 18 months is indeed bogus. But 5 years down the line? Who knows what ATI's absorbion into AMD will do to their position in the high-end discrete market. Yes, we'd all like to believe that they will remain autonomous and that AMD won't "mess with them" but history is full of acquisitions where the parent company promised autonomy, and the royally screwed a business unit by focusing them on different goals. If AMD finds itself in trouble because of a misstep, and they need bread-and-butter components with high margins, they wouldn't think twice of pulling people off promising R&D.

 

I must agree there are signs from the respective press conferences that in the future ATI will be focusing on integration and using AMD fabs rather than producing high end SKU GPU parts.

However since the 3D field is beginning to consolidate and some members here have posted that the GPU industry is going to go into the same evolutionary step that the CPU's went through in the past, i.e. features complete but adding speed to each iteration and longer development times perhaps, then in 5 years time it may not matter much anyway.

 

You'd have to expect that during the takeover discussions ATI would have made it very clear to the AMD management how important keeping up the race in the high-end market is. As in, "If you're going to cut back on the high end you might as well give up" type of discussion.

The merger does make me think that it is now much more important for the the R600 series to offer 'more' in comparison to G80 than previously was the case. It would be very good for ATI/AMD if they found themselves in another R300 vs NV30 type situation but if it's more of a NV40 vs R420 then it would be a bad start for the new merged company.

Personally I'm guessing it will be pretty much another R520 vs G70 situation with rough parity between the parts. The question is will ATI/AMD be able to cut into NVidia's market share?

 

I don't know what signs those are, because what I read was that ATI can't even think of using AMD fabs for at least 2 years, and even then it's going to be minimal access, like an emergency backup. With AMD as constrained as they are and the DELL deal coming online, I can't imagine ATI focusing on AMD fabs for quite some time. Probably, things will be pretty status quo for the next 4 years or so in that regard.

Also, I don't know why targeting a fab would stop them from developing high end parts in the first place. After all they have to do it each time TMSC's or UMC's process changes, and (for the most part) they manage. I mean, if they could pull off developing the Xenos and R580 simultainiously, this stuff should just be another day in the business.

 

Firingsquad's analysis is up with both Jakub and Brandon opinion on the merger. Jakub's opinion is on contrast to what most people here seem to be suggesting:

"The biggest winner in all of this is ATI."

"NVIDIA is the most likely loser in all this."

While Brandon doesnt agree with him whole-heartedly but agrees on most of his points.

 

Scott from EB thinks that AMD is in a win-win scenario here.

 

if someone is winning someone has to be losing

 

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060727/sfth004.html?.v=58

Well looks like green team scored a point with Intel

Dell and Alienware are using nf chipsets for thier high end core duo systems.

 

That has much more to do with the graphics choice than the actual chipset choice, if they could get a Intel chipset that did SLI than they would have gone with it. But Nvidia forces SLI with the chipset.