It's Official - AMD Buys ATI

FrankNFurter writes "It's been a rumour for several weeks, but now it's confirmed: AMD buys ATI. What implications is this merger going to have for the hardware market?" In addition to AMD's release, there's plenty of coverage out there.

Comments

See Hackers Dictionary: "Wheel of reincarnation"

[kriegsman]

AMD needs GPU functionality on the CPU.

See the entry in the Hacker's Dictionary / Jargon File for "Wheel of reincarnation":

wheel of reincarnation: [1968] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. [...]

-Mark

Re:Tomorrow

[ichigo 2.0]

http://contracts.corporate.findlaw.com/agreements/ amd/intel.license.2001.01.01.html

As far as I can tell this deal only covers patents made before 2001 (section 2). I could be wrong though, not very good at legalspeak, and didn't read the entire contract. AFAIK they have another cross-licensing agreement as well, but it only covers all x86 extensions and improvements. This is the deal that you're probably talking about as SSE and AMD64 are x86 extensions. So to answer your question: no they would not need to share tech acquired from ATI.

Re:Maybe

[Tom]

Why are posters so fond of the anti-open source hardware vendor NVidia?

Because they've supported Linux with binary drivers for a long time, and their drivers work.

ATI is months behind, and half of the time the drivers are too buggy to actually use.

Philosophy of openness aside, that's an important difference.

Re:Tomorrow

[Cutie Pi]

You've obviously never tried to reverse engineer a chip using an electron microscope. If so, you wouldn't be saying it is "relatively simple". You obviously don't realize that modern chips have upwards of 8 layers of wiring stacked on top each other, that cover the local interconnects and transister wiring (poly and active area). Now, let's say you can decompose the chip, layer by layer, snapping photos as you go. With today's 65 and 95nm processes, you can only see a few transistors at a time, given the resolution and field of view of the microscope. These chips have millions of transistors on them. How long do you think it would take to cover a sizeable area of the chip, to the point that you could gain some useful information about it? At best, you could probably look at a few latch circuits at a time... That's like looking at the grains of sand on a beach and trying to map out the coastline of Hawaii. By the time these alleged reverse engineers are done, Nvidia would have released two new architectures. Money and time are much better spent creating rather than copying.

x86-64 is not part of the IP sharing

[default luser]

This is because x86-64 is an open standard. AMD released it as open when they announced it, because it was the only way to gain industry acceptance.

Once AMD got Microsoft's cooperation building support for x86-64 into Windows, they hardped on about the open standard. This protected AMD from Intel, who were already secretly working on their own implementation of x86-64. Normally, once Intel realized how potentially powerful x86-64 was, they were sure to create their own incompatible version (ala SSE and 3DNOW!) to try and derail AMD.

But the open standard stopped Intel from doing this. Microsoft pointed to the open standard, and told Intel flat-out that they were not going to support two versions of 64-bit x86.

x86-64 is an open standard. AMD's copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is called AMD64. Inte;'s copyrighted implementation of x86-64 is EMT64.