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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.
..if this is a good thing or not. It might be good for the development and cooperation. Better integration == better graphics/faster machines?
But on the other hand, this could split the market and get things like todays uncompatible browsers. (Which is VERY annoying somethimes)
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this could be real good if AMD's acquisition of ATI allows them to produce full chipsets in the same fashion Intel has with its Centrino line. let the competition begin!
also, not official yet, as government regulatory bodies need to approve it.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. - Aldous Huxley
I was thinking the exact same thing. But I think that, if done correctly, this could really solidify both AMD and ATI as market leaders. If AMD pressures their new acquisition to create a half-decent set of Linux drivers, then this will all be worth the hassle. Or even if they convince ATI to open up the specs, that would be ok too.
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http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 219
*head asploded*
I'm getting the 'gist' of why this transaction needs to happen. AMD needs GPU functionality on the CPU. I think everyone kinda expected that to happen at some point. The Inq. then takes a left turn in the plot and mentions 'mini-cores' which are multi-cores with massive amount of threads. Sort of but not really like Intels' hyperthreading times 32x. Shitloads of threads.
Bottom line?
ATI will work on AMD's new cores. I don't know if they'll work on something that'll plug into a PCIe slot still like nVidia.
nVidia will still be around making graphic cards for AMD. Just won't necessarily be anything remotely similar to what's out on the stores today. AMD doesn't like closed technology like Intel does. So it'll be an open platform still which is a 'good thing' (tm).
Forget about GPU's and chipsets. The main innovation has to come from these new GCPU's.
ATI was going to lose its Intel chipset business anyway with or without this takeover. So no big loss here.
Intel has about a year lead on this tech and probably be first out to market with it.
CPU cores change radically every 5 years or so. With GCPU's, think more in terms of GPU's and radical changes every year to 18 months. Crazy shit.
Plenty of space at FAB 36 to build the new cores and the recently announced plant they are building in New York. So no more costly production runs in Taiwan.
If AMD didn't do this, they'd be out of business in 5 years. Period.
I can't see this being good for customers. As we all know, ATI's products tend to be miserably supported, though this hasn't been the case for AMD thus far. How will this affect the nForce line of chipsets? Given ATI's past I'd much rather have an nForce than whatever ATI kicks out.
On the other hand, perhaps AMD will drag ATI out of it's rut, but I think it's just as probable that ATI will drag AMD down, and that's good for nobody.
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I wonder if this means no more ATI cards in Macintosh computers, seeing as how Apple uses Intel now? Or, even more interesting, could it mean Apple switching over to AMD?
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
This will sorta relieve some of the high-stress factor from the "Intel has killed gaming" theory. In which, most business and "consumer" machines that come with fast intel processors but crappy integrated intel graphics is a joke. These users think "hey I got a Penitum 4, 3.2ghz, I am going to go play Half-Life 2, only to not meet the minimum requirements. With AMD releasing PC's combined with low-cost ATI chips imbedded into their "consumer grade" PC's this could have a strong uproar towards the PC gaming market. PC's will get cheaper, and more people will have a computer that is remotely possible of gaming (unlike in the past). I see this merger as a good thing. We know that ATI will continue to run neck and neck with Nvidia which is a good thing, because if ATI dropped out of the ball game, then Nvidia would hold the 3d graphics chip as a monopoly. (unless you consider Savage and Matrox competition)....
So, we'll see how this shakes out. If, as others have said, AMD forces ATI to produce better drivers, and good Linux drivers, that may be a good outcome...
The other interesting aspect is (as it often is) Apple. Now AMD gets an instant slice of the Apple pie (sorry) since ATI makes most current Apple graphics chips. Interesting development there... Intel can't be happy.
I suspect the tension level just notched up at NVIDIAs headquarters as well.
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Now that ATI is part of the AMD, the worst case is ATI division is given little attention, developers move to CPU core development, NVidia remains the only serious GPU vendor, and things go downfall from there.
A second worst outcome is Intel enters a pact with NVidia, so next gen NVidia cards are so integrated with Intel chipsets that they do not run well on AMD. If you buy an AMD platform, you can only buy an ATI video card. If you buy an Intel platform, you are bound to NVidia. This would suck bad as well.
I do not see good outcomes from this merger. Possibly better integration with AMD products is not something I as a customer would care about. ATI being focussed on GPUs only sounds much better for the customers than a division of a large computing devices company. At the very least, ATI is now somewhat concerned about Linux gamers, because it needs them. Who is to say that as part of a large and much more stable company, the ATI division will still give a rat's ass about Linux?
The best outcome possible - With the backing of AMD's large patent portfolio, ATI division opens up the specs to all of their GPUs. Programming manuals. Device driver instructions. Linux drivers improve in leaps and bounds. Linux users switch to AMD+ATI. Windows gamers switch to Linux. Microsoft crumbles under its own weight and withers. Sightings of Belzebub trying on skates are reported.
IIRC there's a mutual deal between ADM and Intel (part of the setlement of a lawsuit) that allows one company to use the other's technologies. that's what allowed AMD to integrate SSE 1/2/3 in athlons and Intel to integrate AMD64 in pentium4/xeon.
if they both buys graphic chipsets companies, does this means nvidia's technology on ATI GPUs and the other way around ?
or will they shield the newly aquired techs from the setlment ?
What ? Me, worry ?
NVidia seems to make better blobs than ATI, but it is still a blob:
The wishful thinking is that now ATi are owned by AMD, they might produce 3D hardware which they publish the hardware interface so we can ave open source graphics drivers. But I'm sure it'll never happen.
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The Wheel of time has turned again. GPUs are now general-purpose massively-parallel computers; they will be folded back into the CPU core, so that the general purpose CPU gains massive parallelism. Kind of like SIMD, but on the order of a million operations per instruction instead of 8.
The next 10 years will consist of a new type of external graphics hardware being built, which will of course, be folded into the CPU at the end of it.
Seems highly unlikely to me that they'd stick a GPU into the CPU. Modern GPUs are a similar size to CPUs (if not larger) and need much higher memory bandwidth... so you'd be doubling the size of your CPU and you'd need a 256-bit 1GHz+ memory interface. And then the 'high end' users would just go and buy a PCI-Express card when the next generation came out, making the whole thing a total waste.
I could see perhaps that they'd stick a cheap and crappy GPU into a cheap and crappy CPU for the low end of the market, but with Vista coming out with all its eye-candy that may not even be viable for rendering the Vista desktop, let alone games.
Typing "init 6" and then making a cup of tea for when my machine comes back up is far more relaxing.
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The linux crowd (or at least a vocal minority of them), don't want drivers, they just want documentation for the card, they'll make their own drivers.
On the other hand, releasing either open source drivers, or a combination of binary drivers, along with documentation (so those who want to write their own CAN), would certainly be the best of both worlds.
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Before this deal, AMD had about $3bn in cash. The Register says that Morgan Stanley will loan AMD about $2.5bn to get the deal done. This will leave AMD with no spare cash to fight the long war against the onslaught of Intel Core processors and upcoming quad-core Xeons - due this year. Disclosure - I just picked up 600 Intel shares at $17.50.
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AMD is covering the remaining $2.5b of the deal with a commitment letter from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, with the debt secured by "a pledge of the capital stock of certain material units of the company, accounts receivable and proceeds from any sale by Advanced Micro of its equity interest in Spansion Inc." The CFO is overly optimistic that the company can get rid of that debt "quickly," without layoffs, and with savings of $75m and $125m over the next two years. DJ Newswires says ATYT will no longer work with Intel, and the execs say that they can make up the lost sales with the severing of Intel-ATI ties. Pretty lofty goals, I'd say.
Hard as in has to have the better implementation of the various technologies rather than just exclusive rights to them?
They're there affecting their effect.
nVidia CAN'T open up their drivers IIRC. nVidia was founded by a bunch of SGI engineers, and once they started producing products the folks over at SGI found some of their technology in the nVidia products. As part of the settlement, nVidia can't release the code since I think they had to license it from SGI in the end.
I could swear that's they way that it is, but I can't find any definitive reference to the settlement.
They borrowed $2.5 billion to pay for ATI. This is top of all the other debt that they owe, they still haven't payed off the massive cost of the 2 fabs in Germany and they also own a lot of stock in Spansion which itself is heavly in debt.
AMD has been loosing money for a lot of years (only in the last 2 years they started making profit)
Now they have a price war with Intel and they have to compete with Conroe, so they can't even count on making any profit from the next few quarters.
Looks like they are living on the knife edge.
The drawback would be a lockout for experimental 3D APIs. But it would be no worse than the binary driver situation we have now.
So the second best CPU maker and the second best GPU maker pair up? Unless AMD+ATI have an ace up their sleeve this won't be good for competition.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Taking into account all the fanboi anguish, let me point out the very simple fact that now ATI no longer directly competes with NVidia. You could say that the competition would be between AMD and NVidia now, but that's not quite right either. The fact is that the market has become so diverse that all these companies were already competing with each other, despite partnerships and deals.
...) The power and bandwidth demands for next gen GPUs are becoming more than expansion boards can handle. Instruction sets are becoming extremely CPU-like. Since the whole universe seems to be moving into Multi-processor designs anyway, perhaps we'll even see some kind of GPU-MMX style expansion of the x86 instruction set (call it v86 for now).
AMD, ATI, NVidia and Intel *all* make motherboard chipsets.
ATI, Nvidia and Intel all make video processors.
So do SIS, S3, and VIA.
Yet they all work (relatively) well with each other.
This isn't about marketshare, it's about technology. ATI does something that AMD wants, so AMD is acquiring the company for the tech. The market won't feel a thing, I promise you. Competition will continue, just like it did when Micron acquired Rendition (wipes a tear for his Verite v2200) and when NVidia bought out 3dfx (wipes another for his Banshee).
Since everyone's got their prognosticator's caps on today, I'm going to come out and say that, within 5 years, we'll be seeing GPU processors integrated into the motherboard, accessable to both ATI and NVidia (and Matrox, and S3, and
I think we're seeing a move back to specialization. We've already got separate Audio chips, separate networking chips, even chips to handle I/O for RAID and such. With the new market for Physics co-processors, I'm sure we'll only see more for tasks such as AI, and when the next big UI design is unleashed (either some kind of brain-reading technology, or a true 3d input system -- the WII is just the tip of the iceberg!) another co-processor will be made to handle that. With AMD's focus on integrating external processors with technologies such as HyperTransport, undoubtedly they'll be able to compete for a long time.
And the best part is, we get to choose from strong market competitors. As long as there is innovation, we win.
According to the merger telco. the only substantial argument for the merger from the company's side is that they want to get into the embedded device business. They hope to provide a platform for media processing on cell phones, TVs and the like.
The Q&A session is apparently already up at The Pirate Bay (though I didn't manage to download it yet): http://thepiratebay.org/details.php?id=3506714
Interesting that they think they'll be able to continue having a good relationship with nVidia. I'd guess it's just PR speak though for "as soon as the merger is complete, you're unimportant to us".
The CEO Hector Ruiz went on and on like a drone, repeating the same fluff over again (like background noise) and it wasn't until those few moments where his minions were allowed to speak something intelligible was said.
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Wonder if AMD will force ATI's hand to Finlay release a decent ATI video driver for Linux now?
Sig
EM64T is Intel's version of x86-64[1]. It is slightly different from AMD's implementation, but most code compiled for one will work on the other.
Can we please stop calling it AMD64? It's a small number of extensions to IA32 - smaller than SSE - and AMD introduced it as x86-64.
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Isn't SGI in the process of folding? What happens to the contract once SGI is gone?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If they don't have the staff on hand to do this sort of thing, I'd be very surprised. Besides, my point isn't that they should be doing this, it's that their true competitors can afford to do this (and probably DO decompile drivers and analyze the GPUs very closely) so why slight third-party developers who are actively willing to work to develop drivers for your products for FREE?
It's amazing how so many slashdotters who work in the "real" world are purposely argumentive for solely the purpose of being difficult.
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Bullshit, plain and simple.
As a games programmer who works on AAA PC titles I can tell you that it simple isn't true that the intel chipsets are incapable of running games. You can't treat them as if they're a new generation top of the line GPU but they run games just fine.
And unlike AMD intel are much friendlier towards helping games companies. Which company runs seminars and training on and off site on multi-core multi-threading for games? Which company sends out development machines to developers so they can test their games on the latest hardware? Which company builds performance and profiling tools and provides source code and samples to developers?
AMD do nothing for the gamer or the games industry apart from providing some processors that run floating point maths very well however Intel reaaly do make a difference.
There is one obvious reason for the purchase, already stated by others. I'm just reiterating.
Next year, AMD will be shipping quad core Athlons and Opterons. But, if they wanted to they could replace one CPU with a GPU and have video on die. And if they wanted to they could replace a second CPU with sound, USB, SATA, Gigabit, wireless etc etc etc, and have an entire computer on a chip.
VIA has been trying to do this for years. AMD has the fab capacity to pull it off.
AMD could be the first company to enable the $150.00 PC to exist (by saybe 2009). Smaller than a mac-mini, dual core, and all you need to get it to run is slap some flash memory on board for a hard drive substitute, some DDR2, a cheap DVD drive and Voila! Instant computer.
Imagine a Dual Core Athy with a gig of ram, 20GB flash disk all in the form factor of about twice the size of an IPOD.
Oh you could put a screen on it too, DGMS.
This could be a great thing. My only advice for AMD / ATI is: Dedicate some resources to drivers, or better yet, open source the GPU API.
Raydude
Ok, time to blow off the moderations that I've made so far as you're missing something fairly obvious. Take a look at the processor on the 7800GTX, with 300 million transistors it is currently the most complex chip being shipped (I don't how big Cell is). In exchange the peak processing power is 320Gflop/s (40 in the vertex processors, 280 in the fragment shaders). For comparison the floating point performance in a CPU is ~ 8Gflop/s. That's a whopping 40 cores to break even on graphics processing.
Once you can fab a processor large enough to contain 40 functional cores - how big a GPU do you think you could fab on the same process? The simple fact is that a GPU is completely crippled compared to a CPU. There are huge tradeoffs in the design to get that kind of performance. Stream processing is very limited compared to a von Neumann architecture if you care about latency in the slightest. But for graphics - it's perfect. Throwing completely independent parallel chunks of data through an array of vector processors is a much simpler challenge than attempting to extract parallelism from sequential code. The sequential code has pesky things like control-flow that is missing in the gfx shaders, and I don't mean the rubbish that ATi/Nvidia are selling as control-flow in their current designs. That is sheer marketing given the size of the shader batches and the depth of the pipelines.
So I don't think the big 'ol wheel of reincarnation is going to move rendering back into software anytime soon. But what people forget is that AMD is not really a processor company. They are a fab company that just happens to design some kick-ass processors. Their main business is silicon, and buying ATi is the biggest chunk of vertical integration you can imagine...
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