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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.
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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)
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...
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
At first glance, this is a stupid idea for AMD, but upon reflection, it isn't that bad. We've got to look at the 5 year picture for a deal of this size. What will AMD need to do to be more successful in 5 years than they are today? Well, despite what the teenage gamers will say, it actually doesn't mean having the highest FPS in Quake 5. The stable, highest volume, and generally profitable sales are in corporate servers and workstations. That's Dell, HP, and to a lesser extent Gateway, Lenovo, et al. So, what do they need from AMD or Intel? They want cheap, fast, reliable supply, few defects, and ease of integrating into the individual computers. After several years of the Athlon and Opteron, AMD is only now starting to get a toe hold in workstations and a reasonable share of server CPUs.
IMHO, AMD would be well advised to start shipping it's own chipsets, just like Intel. It just makes things easier for their most important customers, the big OEMs. They have one less vendor to worry about. There's less testing required, since presumably AMD would test the CPU and chipset together. And it's less risky for both customers and AMD since AMD has a very strong incentive to make sure that chipsets will be available for their platform on time, whereas third parties have different priorities.
Then there's the whole GPU angle. Why shouldn't GPUs be produced in company owned, i.e. tweaked for performance, fabs? They're every bit as complex and big and expensive as CPUs. Bringing that in house should give a nice bump to performance. And what is a GPU going to be in five years anyway? On the AMD platform, all the tools are in place to allow the GPU to work much more like a cheap DSP/co-processor than we've ever seen before. If the Opteron wasn't an Itanium killer, maybe a couple Opterons and a couple "GPU-DSPs" will do the trick. Even for regular workstations, imagine just plugging a GPU into a free socket on the MB? That would fit very nicely in the middle of the graphics market... way better than integrated, but way cheaper than an add-on card.
Lastly, AMD needs a way to use the last generation fab equipment a little longer. Making chipsets would let them use the fab equipment for an extra few years. They lost that cost efficiency when they spun off the flash business. Fab gear is expensive, so it's kind of a waste for them to be yanking it out everytime the minimum for a marketable CPU moves higher.
Five years ago AMD needed partners and an ecosystem to support their own platform and survive as a company. The next five years are about turning the CPU market into a duopoly.
I have a few shares of AMD. And I'd like to see this deal happen, but only at a decent price (from AMD's point of view). Hmm... this post turned rather long...