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It's Official — AMD Will Retire the ATI Brand

Posted by timothy on from the rose-by-any-other-name dept.

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."

10 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Great news by mangu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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."

    Good. Getting rid of the PCI-e bus between CPU and GPU is one important step in getting massive parallelism to work well.

    Since we hit the 3 GHz barrier, where the speed of light itself becomes a limit, putting the processing elements physically closer is essential to get better performance. Now let's see them put 4 GB or so of fast RAM on the same chip.

    1. Re:Great news by data2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      So with current die-sizes of about 146mm^2, assuming it's really square, we have a maximum length of about 1.7cm. Sounds like we can go up to 9Ghz, at least if we are just using the speed of light in vacuum.

    2. Re:Great news by mangu · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There's an anecdote that admiral Grace Hopper gave "nanoseconds" as gifts:

      "Although she was an interesting and competent speaker, the most memorable part of these talks was her illustration of a nanosecond. She salvaged an obsolete Bell System 25 pair telephone cable, cut it to 11.8 inch (30 cm) lengths (which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond) and handed out the individual wires to her listeners"

      I've also read about someone else giving out "picoseconds" in the form of tiny mustard seeds to illustrate how much the speed of light limits data processing.

    3. Re:Great news by Antisyzygy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I agree. I think that Intel will have to either seriously step up their graphics production or make nice with Nvidia and try to offer some joint solution. AMD is going to beat Intel to the punch here in starting a trend. I have no doubt developers will use some clever tricks to get the most out of the combination.

      --
      That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
  2. Wil this affect open source drivers by La+Gris · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Are there any deeper changes to come behind the re-brand? ATi involved in producing open source drivers ans specs for their GPU. Will this name change carry some bad news about the current openness?

    --
    Léa Gris
  3. Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 by Murdoch5 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This was a great merg. This merg lead to the first decent Ati drivers being created on the Linux side. If this wouldn't of happened then how much longer would ATI of survived. They basicly said FU to Linux and ignored it. Great Merg.

  4. Re:Retired ati a long time ago.. by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I bought an nVidia 7200 in my laptop and have it explode out of warranty. No way was I going to buy another nVidia.

  5. Red or green? by cerelib · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Without the red ATI logo, will they continue to use red as the brand color of their graphics products? Or, will people now be choosing between AMD green and Nvidia green? It may sound superficial (because, by definition, it is), but rival groups always seem to have different colors. It makes for a nice mental distinction when looking at their products. My only guess is that it will probably look like the "AMD Vision" logo or might even be an extension of that branding.

  6. Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 by blackraven14250 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If this wouldn't of happened then how much longer would ATI of survived. They basicly said FU to Linux and ignored it.

    Are you seriously implying that ATI's rebound after being bought by AMD was because they started to provide Linux drivers?

  7. Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 by MBGMorden · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm hoping he's not saying that, but I think it IS clear that AMD has done of better job of managing ATI than ATI was doing itself. Improved Linux drivers are merely one tiny part of that.

    The reality is, if AMD HAD been blocked from purchasing ATI and no one else did, they likely would have folded and we'd simply have nVidia is the (almost) sole provider of discrete graphics chips.

    What really scares me though is that if AMD ever ends up folding, we revert to single supplier situations for both CPU's and GPU's in a single blow.

    --
    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain