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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.
... 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.
AMD has their own chipsets, they're not buying ATI for that. The thing that AMD doesn't make of their own is integrated graphics chipsets. Intel is the largest vendor of graphics hardware (they either beat NVIDIA and ATI combined, or they come close to it). With Windows Vista coming out and requiring a GPU for Aeroglass, it totally makes sense for AMD to start producing integrated graphics solutions.
AMD has had me as a customer ever since I went shopping for a budget chip a few years ago.
Celerons sucked so much (they were still PII-based at that time, IIRC), but I didn't want to shell out for a real Pentium... then along came Duron, a line of chips that not only outperformed the Celerons by a large margin (and often at much lower clock speeds!), but were also FAR cheaper. Hell, there was a year or so there when one could buy a high-clocked Duron that would benchmark higher than many of the actual Pentium chips, and at budget-chip prices!
Since Intel has yet to really exceed AMD in the price/value ratio since that time (though they are supposedly closing the gap when it comes to high-end chips), I've stuck with AMD. I imagine that they won over lots of other people at that time, as well--especially those who pay attention to these kinds of things (geeks).
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.
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