Why AMD Could Win The Coming Visual Computing Battle

Vigile writes "The past week has been rampant with discussion on the new war that is brewing between NVIDIA and Intel, but there was one big player left out of the story: AMD. It would seem that both sides have written this competitor off, but PC Perspective thinks quite the opposite. The company is having financial difficulties, but AMD already has the technologies that both NVIDIA and Intel are striving to build or acquire: mainstream CPU, competitive GPU, high quality IGP solutions and technology for hybrid processing. This article postulates that both Intel and NVIDIA are overlooking a still-competitive opponent, which could turn out to be a drastic mistake."

Comments

Cash Crunch

[Guppy]

I used to know an engineer who worked for AMD, and one of the things he would tell me about were the problems with the merger with ATI. There were a lot of manufacturing and engineering differences between the two companies that made it difficult to combine designs from the two. In addition, the poor financial situation of AMD meant they didn't have enough time and money to complete the "Fusion" CPU/GPU combo -- one of the main drivers behind the merger in the first place.

He said that the company will still bring something out, and that something will still go by the codename "Fusion", but it will not be the product originally envisioned at the time the companies decided to merge. He speculated maybe some kind of Multi-Chip Module -- essentially just a separate CPU and a separate GPU die mounted into the same packaging.

Re:... vested interest.

[hey!]

There's always an element of drawing the bullseye around the bullet hole in business planning. Your position is never quite what you'd want it to be (with rare exceptions), so you job, in part, is to imagine a bright future that, through an incredible stroke of luck, start right where you're standing right now.

The thing is, while that is all necessary and good as part of business planning, individual investors really ought not to make investment decisions based on this kind of planning, unless they have their own teams of researchers and analysts and their own sources of information.

If you know nothing about the technology, you can't really examine something like this critically. If you know a great deal about it, you are even less qualified to make prognostications, because your opinion about what is good technology messes with your opinion about what makes good business sense.

Mark Twain was a very intelligent man, who lost his entire fortune investing in a revolutionary typesetting system. The things that made him a great writer made him a lousy investor: imagination, contrariness, a willingness to buck convention. Of course, exactly the same qualities describe a superb investor. The thing that really did him in was overestimating his knowledge of a market he was peripherally involved in.

It was natural for Twain to be interested in the process of printing books and periodicals, and to be familiar enough with the process of typesetting in general to see the potential, but not quite intimately enough to see the pitfalls. He would have been better off investing in something he had absolutely no interest or prior experience in.