AMD-ATI Merger on the Way?

miketronics writes "Forbes.com is reporting the possibility of a merger between industry heavyweights AMD and ATI. This is largely based on a 'prediction on recent checks in the PC food chain' by industry analyst Apjit Walia. A move like this might give AMD some leverage over Intel, who has been slashing prices lately to compete with a major surge in AMD popularity in both the home and server markets. Despite AMD's recent gains Intel still has a dominant market share and consumers have high hopes for their upcoming Conroe processors."

Why not Nvidia

[Anonymous Coward]

All I can think is why AMD ins't looking at nvidia instead? If I had my choice of companies to chose from, it wouldn't be ATI.

this merger would throtle Intels sales because...

[Brit_in_the_USA]

... Intel is very dependant on ATI at the moment to supply intel CPU compatible chip-sets/Motherboards to help Intel move it's stock pile of CPUs. As Intel has a chip-set shortage which means it can not shift CPU's as fast as it would likes. (almost every new CPU requires a new MB).

*IF* AMD bought ATI they could immediately can the ATI Intel motherboard line and deliver a big blow to intel's profitability for the next quarter or two.

Doesn't make sense

[DeafDumbBlind]

AMD doesn't need ATI's tech or headaches. The best chipsets for AMD's systems currently come from Nvidia; why would AMD want to piss them off?
Nvidia's founder worked at AMD in the 80s and the 2 companies have a pretty close relationship. I can see a merger with Nvidia making sense, but buying ATI would be a blunder.

Re:Why not Nvidia

[kimvette]

Amen to that.

As far as I am concerned, ATI is evil.

Their customer service USED to be excellent, better than other video card vendors. Unfortunately when DiamondMM lost the first video card wars and ATI got really huge, their driver quality sank very quickly and their customer service went from the best to quite possibly the worst - worse than even generic video card companies like Jaton. Not only that, they went from being quite supportive of X to being downright hostile (this change took place right around the time they bought up the charred corpse of Diamond) and REFUSED to disclose info to Linux developers, taking on the "proprietary intellectual property" mantra that Diamond used to love to chant. As if releasing "register c8e3 does foo" is going to reveal how you developed your chip mask. Idiots. Just release the map already, okay?

ATI's drivers have become more stable in the last couple of years on the Windows side, and they've become slightly less evil in the Linux world by releasing (partially-functional - no 3D - WTF? No Radeon 7500 support? WTF!) binary drivers for X and register maps for older products, but they still have an extremely long way to go before I will consider buying any ATI products. Hell, they STILL haven't ever released a driver which will enable the tuner on any of my ATI tuner or All in Wonder cards on Linux. Even worse, the open source driver (on supported cards) significantly outperforms the proprietary driver on several systems I've tested. Also, I've never managed to get GL117 to run on ANY ATI card, but NO problems on NVidia or even Screw ATI.

If AMD teams up with ATI, not only will I avoid ATI products, but I will also stick with Intel processors. Besides, with Intel's new cores, it's Intel's turn to babystep back into the lead again for a while. I think it's more likely that ATI's evil would rub off on AMD, and ATI would not improve any.

Next chip designs are SOC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people are missing a point here and would be enlightened by a presentation given by Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems (view on sun.com under Sun Media Center / Innovation / Chip Innovation), where he describes the next and future generation of Chips and computing technology.

He makes a comment / prediction that Intel might as well go and buy a graphics company like nVidia to get the graphics and other technologies and to integrate these into the System On a Chip, along with DRAM and other currently discrete components - as this is seen as the next step in computing architecture.

Re:Very unlikely, but...

[PixelSlut]

AMD has their own chipsets, they're not buying ATI for that. The thing that AMD doesn't make of their own is integrated graphics chipsets. Intel is the largest vendor of graphics hardware (they either beat NVIDIA and ATI combined, or they come close to it). With Windows Vista coming out and requiring a GPU for Aeroglass, it totally makes sense for AMD to start producing integrated graphics solutions.

Re:quick question

[Fallingcow]

AMD has had me as a customer ever since I went shopping for a budget chip a few years ago.

Celerons sucked so much (they were still PII-based at that time, IIRC), but I didn't want to shell out for a real Pentium... then along came Duron, a line of chips that not only outperformed the Celerons by a large margin (and often at much lower clock speeds!), but were also FAR cheaper. Hell, there was a year or so there when one could buy a high-clocked Duron that would benchmark higher than many of the actual Pentium chips, and at budget-chip prices!

Since Intel has yet to really exceed AMD in the price/value ratio since that time (though they are supposedly closing the gap when it comes to high-end chips), I've stuck with AMD. I imagine that they won over lots of other people at that time, as well--especially those who pay attention to these kinds of things (geeks).

Consumers Don't care

[Isaac-1]

99%+ of consumers could not tell a Conroe series processor from a Coppermine series processor, in fact 99%+ of consumers could not tell a Conroe from a Katmai if you hit them in the head with it.

Ike

AMD is great

[Britz]

Even if you only buy Intel, because the competition finally woke up Intel and made them throw out their horrible netburst design. Companies that don't have any competition deliver mediocre products at best. Look at Microsoft. If Intel didn't have AMD on their tail we would still be stuck with the shiny new 5 Ghz Pentium 4 coming out in 2008 with a fraction of the computing power per cycle compared to the current P4 design (every desktop design since the P3 had less bang for every single cycle, but Intel made up for it by clocking them up so high that the new processor was faster overall).

The Pentium M OTOH has a very good design. Thanks to that Intel still dominates the portable market. Maybe they can revive their strength on the desktop side as well now.

Re:We could get closer to FOSS driver...

[kimvette]

The way I see it though, NVidia will never act first, and they shouldn't. NVidia's excellent software drivers have led them to become the undisputed favorite graphics card chipset for Linux users. The hardware performance (atleast in Windows) between the top level ATI and NVidia cards is pretty similar. So NVidia has a distinct advantage over ATI in this regard, and they won't want to give it up.

I'm confused.

How does documenting a register map, or even opening the source for drivers even, reveal the chip mask?

And how does keeping the source for the drivers closed deter competitors?

Given that ATI and NVidia both possesss or have access to electron microscopes (I cannot imagine any chip fab would not have access to at least one) and can buy each others' products anonymously OTC at the nearest Best Buy or Frys, and can decompile and reverse engineer each other's drivers, what "competitive advantage" would each be losing for the other?

No, I suspect that it's all about PR and mystique. Mystique being that "OOooh NVidia is faster than ATI this month, how did they do it?" or PR being that they don't want the Open Source implementation to outperform their binary release, and they want to avoid that public embarassment. That's my guess anyhow. With that said, as far as open source drivers go, the Radeon drivers are phenomenal compared to ATI's abysmal Catalyst release, and where Proprietary binary drivers go, NVidia's drivers are an absolute dream; thet work very well on many versions of many distributions with no hassles.

A CPU for GPGPU?

[Vegan Pagan]

Lately, ATI has been pushing non-graphical processing on the GPU (AKA GPGPU), and AMD is looking for ways to grow without imitating or directly competing against Intel. If GPGPU software design becomes mainstream, then much of the CPU may become redundant, such as SIMD and multiple cores. Maybe ATI and AMD will coordinate which functions go onto which chip. Intel has always disdained other companies' co-processors (and sells integrated graphics to reduce demand for them), so they're not likely to do this.

Apple/Intel/ATI implications?

[beemishboy]

If this goes through, does that mean that Apple will buy components from Intel *and* AMD (ATI), or will it go down the NVidia path? It seems to just want good components in their systems based on their needs, so who knows, it could get a foot in the door for AMD if they merge... Mmmm...speculations...

ati revenge

[codingh34v3n]

ATI drivers suck ?

i dont know why people talk so bad about ati products, meanly at these times.

I allways had nvidia boards and yes , i liked it because their support on linux started very well (easy install), but their prices now, start to grow against their quality.

so, a few months ago i buyed a cheap ATI and tried to install it, downloaded the drivers from the website.

At the time, there are many tutorials about how to install 3d on ati chips and if you see well, the procedures are very similar to nvidia chips installation.

on debian based systems, with a few apt commands only, in a few minutes you have 3d acceleration on X.

in my case, the 3d performance on games even outperform the equivalent nvidia chipsets. So, where is the complication?

and if you do a "lsmod | grep fglrx" you realize the driver itself use only 1/2 MB of memory against the several MBs of nvidia driver.

so where is the relation quality / performance / price here?

If ATI join AMD, they could put the gfx cpu inside amd cpu and even make a custom main board for their specific product. There are a lot of choices.

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