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ATI and AMD Seek Approval for Merger?
Krugerlive writes "The rumor of an ATI/AMD merger/buyout has been out now for sometime. However, this morning an Inquirer article has said that a merger deal has been struck and that the two companies will seek shareholder approval on Monday of next week. In the market, AMD is down as a result of lackluster earnings announced last evening, and ATI is up about 4% on unusually high volume." This is nothing but a rumour at the moment, a point that C|Net makes in examining the issue. From the article: "AMD has always boasted that it only wants to make processors, leaving networking and chipsets to others. AMD does produce some chipsets, but mostly just to get the market started. Neutrality has helped the company garner strong allies."
I always thought that AMD and Nvidia were the better combo. Besides the ATI Drivers suck for Linux, where a large percent of the enthusiast market's interests lie. Isn't AMD still more of an enthusists processor until it can get into one of the top vendor's machines?
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
As much as I like AMD, I have to say that if Intel and nVidia teamed up they would probably beat the crap out of AMD + ATi.
And if AMD and ATi merge.. It sort of seems like a punch in the face to nVidia. Leaving them wanting to talk to Intel. Leading to... what?
For a long time there have been two beasts in the CPU market and two beauties in the GPU market. AMD and Intel in CPUs, and ATi and nVidia in GPUs. If they marry respectively, the offspring might have the good qualities of neither and the bad qualities of both. I think overall the consumer would probably (more than likely) lose out.
So, I really kind of hope this is just a rumor.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
I think NVidia needs to get into the processor market themselves. Maybe not for general computing, but I bet their designers have some great ideas for a processor that would be at home in a console! With GPU's being so powerful these days, I can't imagine that they lack the expertise to do it.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I'm a big AMD fan. But I'd be really upset to loose the nForce line of chipsets. In my opinion, it's a must for any AMD user. And I think it would be very difficult to come up with a good replacement.
I also worry that chipsets for AMD based motherboards will not work so well with my nVidia video card. Not an ATI fan at all.
I'm going to be watching these guys very closely. This would sway me away from AMD.
As anyone familiar with the botched ATI graphics system in the Xbox 360 knows, whatever competence ATI may have had in the past is long gone.
The Xbox 360 is the first console ever to have PCs outperform it before the console has hit store shelves. In the past, consoles have had at least a year or so before PCs could touch them.
What the hell is AMD thinking?
AMD needs to come up with its own bogus SPEC score generating compiler to grow in the market, not a fucked up GPU maker.
AMD, like Intel, could be convinced to open up the specifications to their graphics hardware in order to sell more of their complement product, processors. The difference is that ATI Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) don't suck like Intel GPUs. AMD could have almost 100% of the Linux notebook market within a year and my guess is HP would be the big winner because they already have a business line of AMD notebooks with ATI GPUs: HP Compaq nx6125 Notebook for Business (New Zealand link since this Anonymous Coward is from NZ)
Nvidia makes the best chipsets for AMD. Why would they want to merge with second-rate vendor? I hope AMD doesn't become as unstable as ATI drivers.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
You need to bear in mind that the GPU is the critical component in most systems, but makes almost no money for the vendor and has a relatively low volume. There is precisely no reason whatsoever for AMD to want to merge with ATi or to buy them up. That would be expensive and earn them little. In fact, given how much they've made from their component-neutrality, sacrificing that might mean they'd actually lose money overall.
On the other hand, CPUs are high volume, high profit, and AMD is gaining market-share. It is an ideal target for a buy-out, particularly as ATi can't be doing that well in the GPU market. Buying AMD would be like buying a money-printing-machine, as far as ATi were concerned. Better still, AMD is a key player in bus specifications such as HyperTransport, which means that if ATi owned AMD, ATi could heavily influence the busses to suit graphics in general and their chips in particular.
(Mergers are never equal, as you don't have two CEOs, two CFOs, etc. One of them will be ultimately in charge of the other.)
If the rumour is correct, then don't assume AMD is the one instigating things - they have the most to lose and the least to gain - and don't assume either of them will be around when the mergers and buyouts finish.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
ATI and AMD shouldn't merge because ATI's drivers suck.
I think that's the concensus on here, certainly the linux drivers are apparently awful.
My AMD64 desktop machine has an NVidia graphics card which works much better than the ATI rubbish built into the motherboard. But I'm not using that machine to write this. In fact, other than for occasional gaming, that machine rarely gets switched on.
I tend to use my laptop. Which has a Centrino chipset.
You know - that one that Intel brought out for laptops? The one that's hugely, massively successful in one of the main growth areas of hardware sales? Everyone wants a laptop... or a home media centre based on a pc but doesn't run like one... Everyone is buying Intel. Why? Because to all intents and purposes all the laptops come with Intel centrino sets. It's dead easy - they're dead easy to support, all the bits work together, no conflicts. AMD? Sure nice chips but who makes Turion laptops? Acer... Asus... and... um... some other companies... Perhaps Alienware? HP make a couple, Fujitsu Siemens make a couple but these aren't their high-end desirable laptops. It's like "well if I spend money I get a centrino, otherwise it's a toss-up between Celeron - the cacheless wonder - and a chip that sounds like a sticky nut treat..."
Who makes Centrino laptops? Dell, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu Siemens, Samsung, Panasonic, whatever IBM are calling themselves now - oh and Acer and Asus and Alienware too but - oh yes, and one really important company who basically stuck 2 fingers up to AMD - Apple. I'll bet Apple choosing Intel hurt. But everyone's buying laptops with Centrino chipsets in... No-one's really buying AMD... because AMD don't provide a chipset and an easy way for manufacturers to just kind of put their machines together in a lego-style fashion.
Does it make business sense for AMD to tie up with the chipset and motherboard manufacturer that also happens to make graphics cards? Hell yes. Does it make sense for AMD to try to get into the laptop market in a meaningful way? Probably. Will their driver support get any better? We can hope...
No shit, Sherlock? Lemme see:
- Dreamcast: had a PowerVR graphics chip that had been available for the PC too for a year or two. Not even the most powerful at that. It was the predecessor of the Kyro and generally a flop in the PC market. In the Dreamcast it had a whole 8 MB video RAM too, at a time when PC graphics cards were moving to 32 MB.
- XBox: basically had a predecessor of the NForce chipset, with integrated graphics. Look at some PC benchmarks for how much those suck. Hint: having half the buss width, half the memory speed, _and_ having to share that choked bandwidth with the CPU, doesn't exactly help with rendering speed.
- PS2: read some developper complaints from back then. It didn't have even half the fill rate or triangle processing rate that Sony had claimed. Trying to even replicate Sony's rigged demos was a failure as soon as you had more than one character on the screen or an even moderately complex background. It took a lot of low level work to get it to run fast enough, while on a PC even a mid-range card never needed such tricks to do its job. And even then there's a reason the vast majority of PS2 games never had more than a handful of characters on the screen at the same time.
Get this, Sherlock: what saved all 3 was that they just didn't have to render in higher res than 640x480. _That_ was their only saving grace.
And it was a saving grace in more ways than the number of pixels rendered too. Rendering in low res makes it ok to use lower resolution textures too (hence needs less memory bandwidth and uses the cache better), _and_ lets you get away with lower polygon counts. If you use the exact same models, the same triangle may be something 8x8 pixels in a console game, but 16x16 on a PC in 1280x1024. The same model may look horribly polygonal on a PC game in 1280x1024, but decently rounded in a console game in 640x480. So PC games had to compensate by using higher polycounts, and PC graphics cards had to be able to process those extra polygons.
So in a nutshell, oh please... pretending that any console from the last decade was actually faster than a high end PC, is just plain old false.
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