Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 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.

  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.