AMD buys ATI

AMD purchased ATI for 5.5 billion Titanium CR123A batteries... err, US $$$$

My present machine is a Athlon64 with an ATI XPress intergrated graphics chipset mobo, ATI X700 Pro 256MB VIVO video card and ATI Theater 550 TV tuner card. My next laptop will be an Apple Macbook Pro with Intel Merom dual core and ATI X1600 graphics. Wonder how all that is going to work?

Apple likes ATI graphics but uses Intel processors. nVidia makes a ton of motherboard chipsets for AMD. How is nVidia going to view making chipsets for AMD/ATI? Intel will probably pull their licensing from ATI to build chipsets for Intel CPUs. Will Intel buy nVidia?

With the upcoming K8 quad-core CPU intergrate support for ATI graphics? Will the K8 have partial intergration with ATI GPUs?

I see a few good points, CPU and GPU optimization, ATI building awesome chipsets for AMD K8 processors since they share info from the bottom up. Maybe AMD/ATI will build a motherboard with intergrated graphics that are very fast since they know what processor is used and also thow in a Theater 550 TV tuner chip, VIVO and all that jazz on an intergrated microATX motherboard. Is AMD/ATI going to build the ultimate Home Theater PC on a microATX mobo and a quad-core low wattage chip?

The downside has a few snags also. Less motherboards chipsets around, Intel will probably optimize their new chipsets for nVidia video cards and this could get ugly. Either AMD/ATI or Intel/nVidia could really slow down competition.

Just wondered what your thoughts are on this merger buyout? (Raggie... were is Raggie?) It does not scare me much, I can see the good and the bad.

What is scary is if Mag bought out Surefire... Fenix bought out Arc or Streamlight bought out Peak. That gives me night terrors!

Didn't see this one coming, though there were rumors about for some time, not even necessarily AMD buying out ATI.

I'd be interested to see where the chipset scene heads also. I like my NForce 4, but I think the new ATI chipsets are on par.

I love my Athlon 64 AND my ATI AIW..

My AMD ATHLON 64 is great.. as well as my ATI Video Card... Maybe we have something here..
-tom

How odd. I've always paired AMD with nVidia... Will nVidia still make nForce boards for AMD chips, or is that going to stop?

Oooh, Carrot, that's a good point..

I think that AMD will continue to support nVidia and other third party chipsets, at least for the short term! They have been more open than Intel in the past and they have publicly stated that they will remain open in the future: http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/24/amd_not_another_intel/
As it stands now I think nVidia makes 90% of all the chipsets for AMD based PC's. So thats not going to change anytime soon!

I have been reading a bit on the reasons for this aquisition.
This is a great article from the inquirer.net about the strategy behind the merger: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33219

I think its going to be very interesting to see what happens in the future with this deal!

Remember: it's not CPUs and GPUs, it's engineers with experience and managers of those engineers with experience dealing with such engineers. AMD has its open attitude towards other hardware designers/makers to thank for a fair bit of its recent success; and I doubt the big guys at AMD have forgotten that. If they did not have nVidia or SiS (VIA took a long time to get good chipsets out), folks would be happy with their slower-but-always-working systems, like was the case with the K6-III and slot Athlons.

Itty cores like Niagara won't work. For multi-user server work, where almost everything is parallel, yes, it does work. Making your desktop that way is going to be a royal PITA--something in the middle, though, will work wonderfully.

Overall, this should have little, maybe no, effect on how well ATi or non-ATi stuff works. This a buy that will take 3 to 10 years to start paying back for AMD, and graphics are a small part of it.