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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.
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.
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
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"
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.
Current catalyst drivers today are perfection relative to what they were like a couple of years ago. They're a vast improvement.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
it's not the devil who changes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Everything I have personally read on every tech/hardware/overclocking/etc site about Conroe has been about the chips slaughtering AMD's top FX chips. The core line has got a LOT of people excited. Intel's finally given up on Netburst, Intel is finally fighting back against AMD, Intel is ready to reclaim the desktop, etc. People who, you know, actually read all that stuff are consumers too you know. Tech is one of the most popular and active subjects on the net. And people talking tech have high hopes for Intel's new line. Calling that bullshit is, well, frankly it's bullshit.
Other than pick with your comment, I agree that these analysts are crap.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
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?
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
I think that the point is, Intel's going to sell millions of conroes, but only a few thousand people will have bought them because of the merits discussed in technical magazines. All the other sales will be because that's what Dell put in the box.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
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.
I'm confused.
How does documenting a register map, or even opening the source for drivers even, reveal the chip mask?
And how does keeping the source for the drivers closed deter competitors?
Given that ATI and NVidia both possesss or have access to electron microscopes (I cannot imagine any chip fab would not have access to at least one) and can buy each others' products anonymously OTC at the nearest Best Buy or Frys, and can decompile and reverse engineer each other's drivers, what "competitive advantage" would each be losing for the other?
No, I suspect that it's all about PR and mystique. Mystique being that "OOooh NVidia is faster than ATI this month, how did they do it?" or PR being that they don't want the Open Source implementation to outperform their binary release, and they want to avoid that public embarassment. That's my guess anyhow. With that said, as far as open source drivers go, the Radeon drivers are phenomenal compared to ATI's abysmal Catalyst release, and where Proprietary binary drivers go, NVidia's drivers are an absolute dream; thet work very well on many versions of many distributions with no hassles.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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...
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.
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
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
Well, if my friends who know nothing about PCs are buying a comptuer, they'll look to their tech-inclined friends. I'll say get a Mac, but when they decide to go PC, I might say, get this line over that line, these Intel chips are better. Tech people have an influence in their non-tech friends/relatives purchases
Duh.