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."

Comments

Why ATI... Go NVidia

[jhfry]

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?

Re:Why ATI... Go NVidia

[Paul Jakma]

Actually, the X.org drivers for ATis are probably the best out there. The problem is they lack support for recent ATi hardware (lacking good 3D support for vaguely recent, e.g. R300 and up, though it's getting there apparently, and completely lacking any support 2D or 3D, for the most recent R500 hardware), as ATi havn't made documentation available in a *long* time.

If you meant ATis' own drivers, yeah, they suck. But really, if ATi just made docs available, the much better X.org drivers would be able to support far more of their hardware..

If the rumour is truee, I hope AMD care about open drivers..

AMD + ATi vs. Intel + nVidia

[The Living Fractal]

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

Depends.

[jd]

If it's ATi trying to buy out AMD (which is perfectly possible), then they might not have enough money left to stop nVidia doing a hostile takeover of them both. That would eliminate one of nVidia's competitors -and- give them control over the CPU that looks set to take over.

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.

Re:Depends.

[TheRaven64]

Once, CPUs did integer computation. Floating point computation was performed by an external chip or emulated with (lots of) integer operations. Now, most CPUs have a floating point unit on-die.

Once, CPUs didn't do vector computations. They were either converted to scalar operations, or performed on a dedicated (expensive) coprocessor. Now, lots of CPUs have vector units.

Once, CPUs didn't do stream processing. Now, a few CPUs (mainly in the embedded space) have on-die stream processors.

A GPU is not much more than an n-way superscalar streaming vector processor. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD wants to create almost-general coprocessors with similar characteristics that connect to the same HT bus as the CPU; plug them directly into a CPU slot and perform all of the graphics operations there. Relegate the graphics hardware to, once more, being little more than a frame buffer. This would be popular in HPC circles, since it would be a general purpose streaming vector processor with an OpenGL / DirectX implementation running on it, rather than a graphics processor that you could shoehorn general purpose tasks onto. The next step would be to put the core the same die as the CPU cores.

The CPU industry knows that they can keep doubling the number of transistors on a die every 18 months for 10-15 years. They think they can do it for even longer than this. They also know that in a much smaller amount of time, they are going to run out of sensible things to do with those transistors. Is a 128-core x86 CPU really useful? Not to many people. There are still problems that could use that much processing power, but most of them benefit more from specialised silicon.

Within the next decade, I think we will start to see a shift towards heterogeneous cores. The Cell is the first step along this path.

Re:completely agree

[Paul Jakma]

I bet if ATI was putting out first rate drivers it might influence quite a few purchases in that direction

Sigh. This detrimentally short-sighted acceptance of binary-only drivers that users like you have is precisely why there are no good drivers for recent ATi hardware, or most recent graphics besides Intel. And until users like yourself start demanding that vendors provide documentation, not binary blobs, graphics support will continue to suck.

Binary drivers kill kittens (thanks airlied for that one). They don't help if you run other free Unixen, they don't help if you use a non-mainstream platform (e.g. PPC, AMD64 up until recently, it doesn't help the Radeon in the Alpha I have here).

Demand DOCUMENTATION - even if it's gibberish to you personally, it's will benefit you far more than binary blobs eventually...