ATI and AMD Seek Approval for Merger?

Krugerlive writes "The rumor of an ATI/AMD merger/buyout has been out now for sometime. However, this morning an Inquirer article has said that a merger deal has been struck and that the two companies will seek shareholder approval on Monday of next week. In the market, AMD is down as a result of lackluster earnings announced last evening, and ATI is up about 4% on unusually high volume." This is nothing but a rumour at the moment, a point that C|Net makes in examining the issue. From the article: "AMD has always boasted that it only wants to make processors, leaving networking and chipsets to others. AMD does produce some chipsets, but mostly just to get the market started. Neutrality has helped the company garner strong allies."

New Logo

[managementboy]

AMD
T
I

Re:New Logo

[DaveM753]

For those that don't like the merger, they can anagram that logo: DAMIT.

Re:New Logo

[daeley]

For those that don't like the merger, they can anagram that logo: DAMIT.

And for the inevitable legal troubles down the road, ADMIT.

Re:Why ATI... Go NVidia

[waveclaw]

The problem is they lack support for recent ATi hardware (lacking good 3D support for vaguely recent, e.g. R300 and up

Funny way to define recent. You don't happen to be a Debian developer, do you?

I just threw away a R300 series card (ATi 9800 XT) for an nVidia SLI. I bought the ATi back in mid '05 and it has sit on the store shelves for 1/2 a year before I picked it up for the "Free" Half-life 2 and then "stable" accelerated proprietary drivers.

I game under Linux. But with an ATi card, nothing worked well or for very long. Wine, the commercial Cedega, even native games would kill the driver. I had to install nVidia dependancies for my team's 3d software. Software which in the end wouldn't work without the nVidia drivers.

If you meant ATis' own drivers, yeah, they suck. But really, if ATi just made docs available, the much better X.org drivers would be able to support far more of their hardware..

I don't see that improving quickly unless somebody is a big itch to scratch builds a community like the one around nVidia. A lot of people doing games in Linux only develop and test with nVidia hardware. Not everyone can afford two $600-800 rigs with recent cards.

Once I switched to nVidia 3D a ton of games that only worked on Windows now install and play as well if not better than native on Windows. Older 3d games like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and Startopia fly at high frames-per-second (> 60-100._ Current generation games like Tron 2.0, Guildwars and Half-life 2 get respectible fps (~30) where the ATi drivers would struggle to get 2-3 fps and often crash if anything changed the drawing state.

I hope AMD care about open drivers..

This assumes that AMB comes out on top. Or that the ATi proprietary midset doesn't infect AMD. On one side you have two companies that are basic chip fabbers, spewing out GPUs, CPUs and chipset engineeing specs as fast and cheaply as possible. On the other you have ATi, buried deep in a race with nVidia, and AMD, who won the last round of CPU wars with x86_64. As has been mentioned by others, mergers are little more than one company eating another. I for one would not be surpised if after any such ATi/AMD merger that the next (last?) AMD nVidia motherboard chipsets are at least 6 months to a year behind the next ATi releases.

At the best, it would be intersting to see a dual-core CPU with one core a GPU and a metric ton of cache. I'd be almost like the old 468SX vs. 468DX days.