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AMD-ATI Merger on the Way?
miketronics writes "Forbes.com is reporting the possibility of a merger between industry heavyweights AMD and ATI. This is largely based on a 'prediction on recent checks in the PC food chain' by industry analyst Apjit Walia. A move like this might give AMD some leverage over Intel, who has been slashing prices lately to compete with a major surge in AMD popularity in both the home and server markets. Despite AMD's recent gains Intel still has a dominant market share and consumers have high hopes for their upcoming Conroe processors."
All I can think is why AMD ins't looking at nvidia instead? If I had my choice of companies to chose from, it wouldn't be ATI.
Gentlemen, start your checkbooks!
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
There goes the amd64 stable keyword...
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
not completely impossible or baseless, considering that ATI makes some AMD-compatible chipsets.
merge with nvidia! grrrrr
At what percentage of market share am I supposed to stop liking AMD?
... Intel is very dependant on ATI at the moment to supply intel CPU compatible chip-sets/Motherboards to help Intel move it's stock pile of CPUs. As Intel has a chip-set shortage which means it can not shift CPU's as fast as it would likes. (almost every new CPU requires a new MB).
*IF* AMD bought ATI they could immediately can the ATI Intel motherboard line and deliver a big blow to intel's profitability for the next quarter or two.
AMD doesn't need ATI's tech or headaches. The best chipsets for AMD's systems currently come from Nvidia; why would AMD want to piss them off?
Nvidia's founder worked at AMD in the 80s and the 2 companies have a pretty close relationship. I can see a merger with Nvidia making sense, but buying ATI would be a blunder.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
IMO this is pretty silly. AMD would be backhanding NVIDIA by doing this. And this would encourage NVIDIA and Intel to merge in response. You really don't want Intel and NVIDIA working as the same company do you? Talk about stiff competition. And this could eliminate some choices we have as consumers on chipsets and video processors. All in all this would be very bad for consumers. I can't see this happening, no matter what the analysts say. Raydude
If AMD owned ATI then this might affect certain consoles. Nintendo and Microsoft both have ATI in their consoles.
Given the bad reputation ATI's drivers have (I have had first-hand experience with relatively recent versions of Catalyst), I can't see this as being good.
Secondly, with many decent AMD motherboards using nForce chipsets, this sounds rather doubtful and could, if it goes through, potentially cause all sorts of competition/anti-trust issues.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
away from being the Intel knockoffs they really are today to putting some of that cool GPU stuff on the CPU and making a better(meaning much faster) though probably heavily DRM'd(thus NOT better) chip. Note that ATI is already pretty badly DRM'd now, so I probably won't ever buy one.
What?
Nvidia make good chip sets so Amd-NVIDIA should be talking about a Merger
I don't want ANY of these companies to merge. I want more houses out there designing chips, pushing the limits, and enabling us to have more and more powerful rigs at a cheaper price. I don't want less competition in the sector one bit. We already only have really 2 choices for CPUs, and two different choices for GPUs. I wish there were a lot more to choose from. What I don't want is to be locked into a specific video card chipset based on whether I have an Intel or AMD CPU.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
That would also open them up to lawsuites for anti competitive acts. because well it is jsut so damn obvious.
.. that they could get away with.. (i would hope they wouldn't though)
now if they bought ATI and canned them completely
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ecn?s=ATYT
Looks like the analyst needed to justify his price upgrade so he started the rumor.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
I think people are missing a point here and would be enlightened by a presentation given by Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems (view on sun.com under Sun Media Center / Innovation / Chip Innovation), where he describes the next and future generation of Chips and computing technology.
He makes a comment / prediction that Intel might as well go and buy a graphics company like nVidia to get the graphics and other technologies and to integrate these into the System On a Chip, along with DRAM and other currently discrete components - as this is seen as the next step in computing architecture.
Not very often, but people STILL listen to them. This is just so much bullshit. Consumers have high hopes for Conroe? More bullshit. Most of the people who will/may buy one don't even know what it is.
This is just so much crap by people wanting to ride the gravy train, and people who want to be able to point to analysts' reports because they are afraid of being accused of making a wrong decision.
The relationship between analysts and people who pay for their conclusions is like mutual masturbation...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
Why not merge with OpenGraphics? ;-)
/Simon
Could be the start of a completely Open Architecture!
it's not the devil who changes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe if I get a blog and use the name 'AnonymousIndustryAnalyst,' I can spew random crap about Google being bought by Microsoft and get it posted on slashdot.
I don't need any actual evidence. I can simply hyphenate lots of words ("near-term tie-up dynamics" and "but we remain negative on the semi-space," anyone?) and base the overall prediction on something as meaningless as "recent checks in the PC food chain."
Instant fame! Now I just need decent advertising.
Remember that AMD is now concentrating almost entirely on increasing its manufacturing capacity, so it can profit from its current position as performance leader. Maybe with both fabs, 36 and 30 (converted to 38), at full capacity producig 65 nm parts AMD will want to manufacture ATI chipsets for the Athlon on its own factories. And maybe will manufacture a few graphic chips as well.
I'm pretty sure the analyst just liked typing ATI and AMD together. I mean I imagine he thinks they do almost the exact same thing... they both begin with A right?
When I read the title, I just knew that the first post would be some AMD+NVidia-loving fucktard who is deeply disappointing that the two most homosexual companies won't cuddle up like he does with his daddy in the shower.
Fuck, you disgusting morons are so predictable it's creepy. I'll even go as far as saying the AMD+NVidia fanbois are more pathetic and lifeless than the worst breed of ugly Mac-zealots.
99%+ of consumers could not tell a Conroe series processor from a Coppermine series processor, in fact 99%+ of consumers could not tell a Conroe from a Katmai if you hit them in the head with it.
Ike
It depends on the value that AMD can bring to ATI. ATI was a great card and has since declined. AMD could change that around and save money on the buyout and gain some technology.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Why would this be anti-competitive? ATI and AMD merge and the new company says they are phasing out their intel chipsets and will now be producing AMD chipsets only. Intel doesn't produce AMD chipsets so why should ATI/AMD make chipsets for Intel? And there are many other places you can go for both a AMD or Intel chipset (SiS, VIA, nVidia, etc). I don't see how there is anything wrong with that plan.
I actually see it as a smart move. I know ALOT of people who don't take AMD seriously because AMD doesn't put out many of their own chipsets. Of course AMD can't put out that many because they want to use their fabs for making as many processors as possible. ATI has the ability to make all the chipsets AMD can use. And know AMD, just like Intel, can offer the one stop solution for chipset/video/cpu.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
The Linux/FOSS community really really wants ATI and/or NVidia to open source their driver.
The way I see it though, NVidia will never act first, and they shouldn't. NVidia's excellent software drivers have led them to become the undisputed favorite graphics card chipset for Linux users. The hardware performance (atleast in Windows) between the top level ATI and NVidia cards is pretty similar. So NVidia has a distinct advantage over ATI in this regard, and they won't want to give it up.
On the ATI front though, it's a whole different story. Every one knows their graphic drivers are lousy. No Linux enthusiast would ever pick an ATI card. But if ATI were to release an open source driver, they *INSTANTLY* become the favorite card for Linux enthusiasts. Plus, with community support, the driver can only get better. It's a win-win. They gain support of Linux users, plus potentially get a better driver.
Why ATI hasn't already done this, I don't know. What could be in their driver (which we all know is lousy) that they need to hide from NVidia? And as far as AMDs role, would some new management possibly reopen the issue as far as letting the driver go open source?
Even if you only buy Intel, because the competition finally woke up Intel and made them throw out their horrible netburst design. Companies that don't have any competition deliver mediocre products at best. Look at Microsoft. If Intel didn't have AMD on their tail we would still be stuck with the shiny new 5 Ghz Pentium 4 coming out in 2008 with a fraction of the computing power per cycle compared to the current P4 design (every desktop design since the P3 had less bang for every single cycle, but Intel made up for it by clocking them up so high that the new processor was faster overall).
The Pentium M OTOH has a very good design. Thanks to that Intel still dominates the portable market. Maybe they can revive their strength on the desktop side as well now.
1. I could careless about the OSS stuff. Binary drivers under X are fine with me.
2. They may make the best hardware however their drivers under any OS just suck. I have never had a stable system with an ATI card even when starting with a clean install.
3. Nvidia would be a better fit.
http://www.beastproject.org/
Get ready for the new A TIMID chipsets!
Lately, ATI has been pushing non-graphical processing on the GPU (AKA GPGPU), and AMD is looking for ways to grow without imitating or directly competing against Intel. If GPGPU software design becomes mainstream, then much of the CPU may become redundant, such as SIMD and multiple cores. Maybe ATI and AMD will coordinate which functions go onto which chip. Intel has always disdained other companies' co-processors (and sells integrated graphics to reduce demand for them), so they're not likely to do this.
If this goes through, does that mean that Apple will buy components from Intel *and* AMD (ATI), or will it go down the NVidia path? It seems to just want good components in their systems based on their needs, so who knows, it could get a foot in the door for AMD if they merge... Mmmm...speculations...
A quick check on newegg lists 214 intel-compatible motherboards.
ATI: 10
Intel: 142
nVidia: 13
SiS: 14
VIA: 35
Yeah, those 10 boards are really going to take intel down...
Wanna buy a bridge?
Being an analyst is awesome! Think about it: you make up wild speculation all day and people pay you for it. Next up: Amazon to buy RedHat and sell it on eBay!
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
if they do it in a way that isn't jsut so they can cause a shortage in Intels market they are fine.. but if they shut it down to cause the intel shortage on purpose tand anyone fines a memo noteing that they did it knowing and willfuly.. well then they are goign to be in the hot seat - just like Intel is right now
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
ATI drivers suck ?
i dont know why people talk so bad about ati products, meanly at these times.
I allways had nvidia boards and yes , i liked it because their support on linux started very well (easy install), but their prices now, start to grow against their quality.
so, a few months ago i buyed a cheap ATI and tried to install it, downloaded the drivers from the website.
At the time, there are many tutorials about how to install 3d on ati chips and if you see well, the procedures are very similar to nvidia chips installation.
on debian based systems, with a few apt commands only, in a few minutes you have 3d acceleration on X.
in my case, the 3d performance on games even outperform the equivalent nvidia chipsets. So, where is the complication?
and if you do a "lsmod | grep fglrx" you realize the driver itself use only 1/2 MB of memory against the several MBs of nvidia driver.
so where is the relation quality / performance / price here?
If ATI join AMD, they could put the gfx cpu inside amd cpu and even make a custom main board for their specific product. There are a lot of choices.
http://www.codingheaven.net/Computing Resource
does this mean i'm finally going to be able to use 64-bit graphics?? 32-bit graphics was just getting old...
Nearly all mergers have a period prior to public announcement of a merger where the price of the two company's shares will change. One usually goes up and the other goes down. Along the way, volume goes up too.
Both companies fail this test.
That does not mean it's not happening. But when there's plenty of money to be made on some privileged information, history is full of people who take advantage of it.
If one of the two is shopping for a merger, then that too would be reflected in the price of their stock.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Actually, you can make anti-competitive moves in the market place, like AMD buying ATI and shutting down the Intel chipset lines immediately depending on certain conditions.
The most prevailing condition being: are you in a monopoly position in your market, or in the market of the company you are purchasing? If the answer is (in the case) glaringly obviously NO, then there is no anti-competitive charge that can be levied. They are acting in order to preserve what little market share their dominant "partner" in the market holds, and for the "little guy" it really is almost "no holds barred".
They simply have to obey the law.
This would be a very bad news to the consumer, considering already low number of competing companies in graphics card and processor industry.
This is slashdot. It is full of mindless drones that just repeat whatever bullshit they are told. They do not think, they do not understand, they simply repeat nonsense. This is why you see crap like "ati's linux support sucks" when its exactly the same as nvidias. Both of them have shitty linux support. And shitty windows support for that matter. But its equally shitty.
Do you have any sort of evidence to back up such a strange claim? This isn't interesting, this is just the usual nonsense.
If agreed this may trigger potencial Intel+nVidia merger as well, very bad news for the consumer, maybe they aiming for some future heavyweight GPU+CPU processor that would knock-out any potencial competition for years to come.
If AMD and ATI merge, it is certianly possible that ATI's evilness could be the one bad apple that spoils the whole barrel. It's also possible that AMD's non-evilness could prevail, and turn ATI into a friendly company again. Nonetheless, I would still prefer AMD join forces with nVidia.
I happen to like ATI quite a bit. I think a merger between AMD and ATI is a bit far fetched, though certianly some kind of close-knit partnership is definitely within the realm of possibility. I replaced a Geforce2 With a Radeon 7500 and have NEVER looked back. I had a very bad experience with nVidia, and went to ATI and have been very impressed with the performance, versatility, and overall capabilities of the cards that I've had. I run Windows primarily. I also run Linux. Both my laptop and Desktop have ATI cards in them. Under Linux the performance isn't the best, but I don't game in Linux either. Here's the key though: It's getting better. Compare the driver updates, fixes, patches, corrections, tweaks, etc. released by ATI in even just the last 6 months compared with nVidia. ATI may not be the best for a Linux system, but they're at least working on it (which is more than can be said for a LOT of companies that have hardware and/or software products which give lackluster performance, if any at all, under Linux). I prefer ATI because they're cheaper, and in my experience, perform better than nVidia cards. Also, ATI makes the card, AND the chipset. I like that in a video card. My thoughts
I've been using ATI and nVidia based products for many years, from graphics boards to motherboards. I'll take ATI over nVidia any day of the week, based on the crappy products I've had from nVidia (including my current motherboard, which is based on an nVidia nForce-4 chipset, ugh).
ATI and nVidia both suck at proprietary drivers under Linux. I happen to have had no problems making my ATI Radeon X700Pro work fine (with hardware accelerated 3D) under Slackware, CentOS, and Ubuntu.
To the contrary, I've only had problems with ATI products.
My first issue was with a card called the Rage Fury Maxx circa 1999. It had *two* processors and 64MB memory. Those were insane specs back then and of course, I expected it to perform well. Well, with D3D games it did performed much better than my Voodoo3 3000, but in OpenGL games the performance was virtually the same, and the two games I played the most (halflife and some other game) were OpenGL. Halflife did D3D, but it looked like absolute crap, so that was a no-go. After a few months, I moved to Windows 2000, and came to find out that there was no driver it, and there never would be. The official message on ATI's site about the Rage fury Maxx said something to the effect of, "Due to the Rage Fury Maxx's hardware design it is technically impossible to write a driver for NT based operating systems". WTF?! I sold the card to a friend of mine for ten bucks and continued to use my Voodoo3 card for quite some time after that.
The second experience was with an ATI Video Wonder TV tuner card. The card worked 'okay', but there were some slight issues I had with it that were annoying. So I went to their site and they had some Beta drivers that supposedly fixed some issues. I installed them and found that they fixed my issues, but removed some important functionality that the previous driver had so I decided to uninstall it. Well the driver had registered itself with Windows file protection serving and became absolutely impossible to remove. I'm sure there was a way to disable the windows file protection and remove the driver, but that was beyond the scope of my knowledge, so I ended up having to reload my system to get rid of the driver. Besides that drive issue, sometimes the TV would freeze while playing and after killing the TV application, the only way to watch TV again was to reboot the computer (presumably because the driver still thought you were watching TV and was busy).
My third experience was (is) with an ATI card that is in my Alienware laptop. It came with a GeForce 9600 mobility card. It blue screens quite frequently and the culprit is of course, the ATI driver. My coworker has the same laptop with the same card, and had experienced the same bluescreens. I just installed a new driver for it that was released recently and it has not bluescreened in awhile, so I'm crossing my fingers.
Finally, here at work we recently received five new desktop systems which came with some new ATI model. They were all having extremely strange errors. Not bluescreens, but weird hang-ups and freezes which were very intermittent. We finally figured out the culprit - the ATI DRIVER. We updated the driver and all is well...for now.
So, I pretty much avoid anything made by ATI like the plague, not because I love Nvidia, but just because of several bad experiences over a many years with ATI, and the fact that Nvidia's stuff generally works. Oh, and plus I'm a FreeBSD user. Not much ATI action going on in the land of Beastie.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Didn't their CEO go to Microsoft's antitrust trial to testify that the government should stop picking on poor Microsoft?
The relevant question is whether the potentially offending party has something called "market power" -- the ability to change the market price for a commodity by unilateral action. While AMD is not a monopoly, the relevant market (intel-compatible chipsets) is concentrated enough that ATI probably has market power, and any attempt by AMD to use ATI to promote demand for AMD processors and harm both Intel and consumers by creating an artificial shortage in Intel motherboards would probably meet with hasty action from the DOJ. It would also be a pretty inefficient way to spend the X billion dollars it would cost to acquire the (profitable) Intel chipset production branch of ATI. They may be better off if they just spun it off -- the DOJ may not look kindly on a merger that gave one party market power over his competitor through vertical market restraints.
I have seen other news articles pointing that intel is in Bed with ATi at the moment for chipset supply, a situation it is a little uncomfortable about. Further googling will turn them up.
Is it possible that AMD might buy ATI to get them "out of the way" of nVidia? Then any technology that ATI has could be shared with nVidia, making them the largest major video card and chipset manufacturer for AMD processors, and discouraging any association that ATI might have with Intel. This could be an incredibly smart move.
"Giving first aid the already disheveled hair projection" -Anakin
1) Intel said in 2001 that Netbust was supposed to scale to 10 GHz.
2) 10.20GHz Intel Nehalem slated for 2005
3) Intel drops plans for 4GHz Pentium 4
(Source: the Inquirer)
However, Pentium-M was in fact a good cpu.
...but is anyone else concerned by the fact that the combination of ATI + AMD spells DAMIT?
I refuse to engage in a duel of wits with the unarmed.
Duh.
1st reply 2 a 1st reply! Boo ya ka sha!
To me this would be marriage of two companies which never could meet their full potential. Both had some sparks, but never quite followed-through to break-out into some sort of a leadership position. Such a merger would probably result in a mediocre company.
No, it wouldn't be anticompetitive - but I bet shareholders won't be happy with it. That's giving away a large chunk of marketshare with little tangible gains - ATi probably moves more Intel chipsets than the amount of AM2 chipsets they would be moving if they stuck to only that.
It would, however, be smart to make your competitor dependent on your chipsets. Then you get lots of small knobs to twist and produce interesting effects. Of course, Intel wouldn't like that and will have to revamp its chipset production/downscale CPU production/increase prices. All nice side effects.
Personall, though, I think this is nonsense. AMD is too tied to nVidia these days and chipset/video is not their main problem right now (at least not on the short term; on a slightly longer term they'll want to have a low-power solution for laptops to compete with Intel, but buying ATi for that is overkill)
I am bestruck with wonderment, sir. Never been able to consider the north end of a south-bound camel anonymously before. Always thought that shit, like beauty, was to be found in the eye of the beholder.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
I am bestruck with wonderment, sir. Never been able to consider the north end of a south-bound camel anonymously before. Always thought that shit, like beauty, was to be found in the eye of the beholder.
That's not wonderment you're bestruck with. Going by the rest of your comment, I would guess that crack cocaine is a more likely suspect.
Where you the anonymous coward who made the original post ? Just curious on this point. I don't do crack - it is addictive. Shit you can get rid of. And I try. I invite you to do the same - anonymously or not. It's easy to start - just take a deep breath, stand up, and shout, "My name is (fill in name here), NO SHIT!" It may help if you do this while looking in a mirror - at least for the first few times.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
I think it boils down to which one you had a good experience with FIRST.
After a long hiatus from computing, I bought an ATI 9800Pro and have never looked back. Replaced it with an X850, happy as larry as we say down under.
Windoze stability issues.... meh, never had em. Catalyst problems... do full uninstall, clean up the old drivers (u can get 3rd party freeware utilities specifically to do this, google it), install new ones, never had any issues.
Now on the topic of linux support... yes ATI does sux in linux, right up to the default -RHGB kernel option crashing in fedora (first boot... not encouraging! hehe), and 3D does seem far more sluggish than in windows. So next time I upgrade I'll be paying close attention to 'nix compatibility, though to be honest, coz I don't play any games in 'Nix I don't really care too much beyond compatibility and stability....
Crap crap crap. On win2k, the .NET control center takes 2 minutes to load on my 1 Ghz Athlon, and If I install directx9 (the card is a bit dated, radeon 9250), framerate drops to ~1-2 FPS where it was 50-70 FPS. And AFAIK directx9 is required to run the latest greatest drivers.
ATI drivers still suck. Thanks to DRI guys for making an open-source driver for Linux for this card, so I don't have to put up with ATIs bullshit.
NVidia isn't much better though.
--Coder
Hi,
I just wanted to say that ATI cards up to 9250 had very nice open-source drivers by DRI. I use them still, and I won't upgrade my 9250 until i can get a card that has 100% open-source drivers.
Too bad more recent cards don't have anything. r300.sf.net (drivers for more recent ATI cards) seems to be stagnating. There is not much more luck with noveau.sf.net either (project trying to make open-source linux nvidia drivers).
Oh, and also, driver support for wireless cards on Linux sucks so much... And there are problems with drivers with NCQ capable SATA controllers too. This annoys me to no end. It is impossible to use recent hardware and have decent linux support for it. I know hardware companies are mostly to blame, but this doesn't improve the situation much.
--Coder
It'd be,
...0001%
50.000... (repeating)
This sig rocks the casbah.
There are no OSS nVidia drivers at all. None. Nope.
Stuck with the binary-only drivers.
ATI's binary driver may be pure shit (as far as I've heard from other users) but :
- there's some opensource DRI support.
- there're some reverse engeneering efforts done to support more recent cards.
So, monomaniac opensrouce zealot, like myself, are more likely to be happy from a merger between those to companies.
Also didn't ATI have plans to use HyperTransport for their graphic chips as opposed to nVidia only using it for chipset and implementing their own protocol for SLI ? I'm not sure, I'm only trying very hard to remember what I've read. Can anyone help ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nothing you have posted suggests that Intel is very dependent on ATI for anything. Sure, third party suppliers like ATI will provide a significant amount of chipsets used with Intel products. If Intel considered that the lack of chip sets was a problem in general they could increase their own production, it's not like they are without factories of their own.
Yes, I agree. The problem is Intel is / has-been short of chipsets. I imagine they are rampign shipset production fast.
HOWEVER, as I commented in my first post, canning the ATI (intel) motherbaord range would hit intel for the next couple of quaters (only).