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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.
Intel buys Nvidia. Let the war continue!
..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)
And we have a psychic
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
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
... But hopefully they'll kick the ATI driver team up the arse and get a decent set of drivers out (for Windows and Linux).
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
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.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
But I did.2 197
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
-Charlie
AMD combines with ATI and has announced a new name for their company:
DAAMIT!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
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.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Getting ANY of their stuff working under Linux is painful.
I'm running OpenSuSE 10.1 on my Thinkpad R51 with a pretty standard ATI Mobility Radeon and can I get the ATI drivers working? Can I hell. Always "no device for screen" or some such error. So I'm stuck with the OSS drivers which although are great for 2D, don't perform well enough for anything other than TuxCart.
On the other hand, the NVidia FX5900 in my desktop machine (also running OpenSuSE 10.1) was a breeze. Drop to run level 3, run installer, reboot, job done.
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
OK, so not very close to reality considering what would be involved. AMD bought into ATI because it wants to focus on CPUs, not chipsets.
However, it does make for an interesting point of interest: the three primary components of PC architecture today are the CPU, GPU and chipset that bind the two together. AMD had two parts of the equation, and ATI has two parts as well, though one of these parts overlap. Now AMD is one company that has end-to-end solutions? There's got to be something interesting coming out of that marriage.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Since (in my opinion) NVidia has taken the lead in GPUs, I hope that ATI will be boosted back into a competitive state and price wars ensue.
Again, to me this is nothing but great news for the end-consumer.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
I think the marketplace has been very well-served by the two dualities that existed before this move: ATI and NVidia beat each other's brains out, as did Intel and AMD. This new dynamic with 3 players does not seem, to me, to promise anywhere near as many benefits for us, the customers. Will ATI become more AMD-centric? Undoubtably. Will NVidia (which has been a great AMD booster) become less supportive of AMD processors? Probably. As this plays out, it seems to me that NVidia will basically be an Intel graphics house (including Macs), and ATI will melt into AMD, becoming mostly an internal chipset house. In the end we lose a very healthy competition between NVidia and ATI. We gain, perhaps, a stronger AMD to keep Intel honest.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
"System on a chip or at least integrated GPU and CPU cool."
A die holding an AMD core and an ATI GPU may be 'neat', 'fab', 'brill' or even 'ace' - but 'cool' - I think not!
AT&ROFLMAO
NVidia seems to make better blobs than ATI, but it is still a blob:
See the entry in the Hacker's Dictionary / Jargon File for "Wheel of reincarnation":
-Mark
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.
I read thru most of the comments on this page, and several people came close to what I think the real reason for this deal is, but no one nailed it. To me, this is a simple example of business 101. AMD has always been a niche vendor. Recently they have begun to spread out, but it is obvious from all the comments on this page that they are still a "gamers" chip. Where Intel and Dell made it big was low-end, mass sale business computers. Intel has their crappy but good enough integrated video chipset which is a part of the vast majority of motherboards. In order for AMD to really be a big player, it needed to a) build it's own integrated chipset from scratch or b) buy a company that already makes integrated video chipsets. Option b won, and while it might cost more initially, it should pay off in the long term.
I believe this will not stop nVidia from making nForce boards, and it would be stupid of AMD to stop production of ATI 3d cards. I think this may increase the quality of ATI's support for Linux, but I don't think it will be anything drastic.
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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right.. because as we all know.. Linux support == market leader.
They may become a market leader for Linux desktops (GPU's aren't needed in servers where Linux is popular).. but Linux desktops are only 1-2 percent of the desktop market...
so even if they gain all of it.. they still won't be a market leader in GPUs.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
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.
Probably because most Slashdotters are not driver hackers nor OSS purists, they are developers, gamers, and power users -- and Nvidia's hardware (and driver support for the hardware) is phenomenal.
Your gripe is not baseless, though: would it kill Nvidia to open up a bit? Perhaps the renewed competition will encourage them to do so, although it's equally likely that they will take the opposite tack and circle their wagons ever more tightly. As long as they provide excellent binary drivers for Linux, I doubt that they will feel much incentive to go Open Source...
The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.
The problem is that Intel's integrated graphics is utterly incapable of running games, it doesn't even properly support DX9. On the other hand both Ati's and Nvidia's IGPs are DX9 compliant and lightyears faster than Intel's IGP. Thus we come to the conclusion that Intel is hurting gaming with it's crappy IGP, because you can't buy a similarly crippled IGP for AMD even if you wanted to. Luckily the next version of Intel's IGP will at least support the DX9 spec properly, as it wouldn't be able to display Vista's Aero UI otherwise..
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.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
I like 3D accel, but I'd be quite happy with an unaccelerated frame-buffer - just as long as is stable.
Go into your xorg.conf and change the "Driver" line to "vga" or "vesa".
You now have an unaccelerated frame-buffer display that will be as stable as the day is long. It will also suck donkey cock, but it is exactly what you just asked for.
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.
A.) Xbox, Nintendo
Analysis.....Good move.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Now tell me: why are the likes of NVidia and ATI keeping their products undocumented and their drivers closed?
Because, if they DO PROTECT THEIR IP, The OTHER GUY has to waste TONS OF MONEY on reverse-engineering teams and highly-qualified people to reverse-engineer the processor via electron microscopes.
It's not the EQUIPMENT that is expensive, it is the PEOPLE. And, as you Linux zealots know FULL WELL, reverse-engineering is EXPENSIVE in terms of PEOPLE and TIME.
If you publish the specifications of your latest graphics chip for all to see, suddenly your competitors don't have to divert staff from working on next-generation architectures just to reverse-engineer your system. Instead, they can analyze your documentation in a fraction of the time.
It's a two-way street, so stop deluding yourself that there's only one side to the story. Publishing full specs for your graphics chips is like writing your competition a blank check. Intel is the only one who doesn't have an issues doing this because their graphics technology is always following.
And to counter your argument: what happens in two years when ATI and NVidia decide your card is too old to support, and yet it still performs very well but you NEED the features in the latest kernel and latest x.org? Go ahead, buy a new video card.
Yes. There are still many well-supported video cards sold in AGP. In fact, you can still get well-supported video cards in PCI, a fifteen-year-old technology. They're not top-performers, but beggars can't be choosers.
The video card market is transitioning to PCIe with surprising speed precisely because they do not want another VLB fiasco. The PCI -> AGP transition was slow because PCI still had a future for other types of cards, but the AGP -> PCIe transition was rushed to avoid market confusion. You can still buy plenty of AGP cards, but the big players have made it clear: there won't be any more improvements for AGP.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
"AMD doesn't like closed technology like Intel does. So it'll be an open platform still which is a 'good thing' (tm). "
Actually Intel has been a big supporter of OSS. They helped port Linux the Itanium and have provided all the documentation to their video chips.
I think you are confusing Intel with Microsoft. Intel has been one of the most open hardware companies.
AMD has also been very good. ATI like nVidia.... Well let's say not so good.
I really don't get this.
AMD could use some good chip-sets but they have made their own for the Opteron so I don't see what they gain from ATI.
AMD could use a good low end integrated video solution for low end desktops and servers. Yes it is true but servers almost never use nVidia or ATI graphics cards. When I set up a server I only plug the monitor in when I do the install and if something really bad happens.
I have to think this comes down to laptops. AMD has not done well in that market and a one stop shop for a laptop solution like Intel offers might be a good solution.
I wouldn't hold my breath on the good open source ATI drivers for Linux. Of course if it happens I might dump my nVidia based motherboard and Video card. I have been buying nVidia just because of their better Linux support for years.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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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