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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)
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!
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.
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 ?
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
Actually, their competitors are unaffected because:
1. They have large enough staff to decompile and perform clean reverse engineering of NVidia's drivers, e.g., one team analyzes the decompiled code and takes notes (without copying code of course), another team designs improvements and implements based on that analysis
2. Their competitors own electron microscopes, making analysis of the chip internals relatively simple.
Now tell me: why are the likes of NVidia and ATI keeping their products undocumented and their drivers closed?
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 -- oops, nope, sorry, they changed slot specs again, and PCI Express cards are no longer available because PCI-X finally gained market share in the consumer market and PCI-E ended up as short-lived as VLB did in the VLB vs. PCI war.
(do I expect PCI-E to die? No, it was a hypothetical example showing the potential problem with proprietary drivers)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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.
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.
That's complete bollocks. Nothing related to copyrights and patents prevents ATI and nVidia from releasing the specs to the X.org/XFree developers. Nobody's ever said "ATI must release the code to fglrx", not least because we know it's so awful we would want to start from scratch. ATI and nVidia's poor reputation in the Free Software community has to do with their refusal to provide non-NDA-encumbered documentation.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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