It's Official — AMD Will Retire the ATI Brand

J. Dzhugashvili writes "A little over four years have passed since AMD purchased ATI. In May of last year, AMD took the remains of the Canadian graphics company and melded them into a monolithic products group, which combined processors, graphics, and platforms. Now, AMD is about to take the next step: kill the ATI brand altogether. The company has officially announced the move, saying it plans to label its next generation of graphics cards 'AMD Radeon' and 'AMD FirePro,' with new logos to match. The move has a lot to do with the incoming arrival of products like Ontario and Llano, which will combine AMD processing and graphics in single slabs of silicon."

Comments

Re:Let The Confustion Begin

[CubicleView]

I can't wait to sort out the confused people around me thinking there are two physical CPUs

I'd imagine that the only people who care to hear about the internals of your computer (if any) will be able to figure it out for themselves.

fglrx

[leathered]

..can they retire that too? please?

Re:Let The Confustion Begin

[cbiltcliffe]

The confusion is that most regular people are only marginally aware of an AMD/Intel distinction, although don't know what it means, and don't know at all ATI or nVidia.

Fixed that for you.

Opportunity knocking for AMD here...

[Qubit]

...AMD's prepping for their integrated CPU/GPU launch. ...
I would image that better Linux drivers might come down the pipeline, though...they'd definitely loose out on a potential market if they completely ignored the issue.

I'd go one step further and say that I think that AMD has an opportunity to highlight their hardware here.

Intel's CPUs and integrated graphics have long had great support in the Linux kernel. Because Intel controls the tech, they can actually provide the correct and full source for the graphics drivers. The problem is that Intel integrated graphics aren't ever anything special.

If AMD is seriously working on integrating their graphics cards and processors -- perhaps even onto the same die -- then they have an opportunity to provide a much more powerful, integrated hardware platform with fully-open drivers. Intel can't compete with that kind of setup, especially as NVidea appears to have an aversion to opening the source to their graphics card drivers.

Re:Great news

[dylan_-]

Really? So when did we all get to using optical interconnects? Electricity doesn't travel at the speed of light.

We're not, but even if we were, that's the fundamental limit. Electricity traveling slower than this makes the problem worse.

And even if it did, for your random, uninformed postulation to be true

You've clearly misunderstood his post, so adding insults just makes you look foolish.

we would need evidence that chips could not practically run faster than 3GHz. Unfortunately for you, that is not the case.

No we wouldn't. If it can't be done in one clock cycle, it'll be done in two (or more). Who said anything about this limiting clock speed?

Anyway, at a higher clock speed, the problem becomes even more pronounced. With a 3.8 GHz clock, a signal at the speed of light only travels 7.9 cm during one clock cycle (but let's estimate about 6.5 cm for electricity).

Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980

[Chaos Incarnate]

We went from there being two manufacturers of processors & two manufacturers of usable graphics hardware... to there being two manufacturers of processors & two manufacturers of usable graphics hardware. Not sure what you're thinking there was for the Justice Department to stop.