DailyTech - AMD Not Dropping ATI Brand

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Steve Kovsky (Blog) - August 8, 2006 4:18 PM

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9 comment(s) - last by Kedrin.. on Aug 13 at 9:18 PM

Another victim of the AMD rumor mill

Our good friends at Ars Technica have a small expose on the incessant vibe of AMD rumors. Although several sites have picked up the story that AMD will eliminate the ATI brand after the merger between the two companies is complete, this is quite frankly false.

The original source of the story has posted a retraction, claiming "AMD has no plans to drop the ATi brand name or ATi's product brands. The ATi name will live on at AMD as our leading consumer brand, and so will the Radeon brand and other ATi product brands. AMD's executive management knows very well the power and value of branding, and ATi's branding is some of the most valued in the global technology industry."

When the ATI-AMD merger was announced, AMD President Dirk Meyer also stated that ATI would simply become a division of AMD, and that there would be no shuffling of brands around in the immediate future.

Recently, a fever pitch of rumors surrounding AMD's "Reverse Hyper-Threading" was also dismissed when it was discovered the original source of the rumor was a poor translation of a future README file to an AMD dual-core optimization utility. Who is taking bets for the next major rumor?

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well I believed it... :/

By hightower204 on 8/8/2006 6:09:55 PM , Rating: 1

I have nothing against AMD but I just couldn't get used to the thought of a AMD Radeon card, it just didn't sound right... I still think it should've been a marriage between AMD and Nvidia - talk about broken love - Nvidia is left out in the cold, Intel could care less about their chipsets (they'd rather sell their own) and what made me concider (and build) a system with an AMD cpu was nforce 2 and 4, not some Via or Sis crap - or Ati for that sake. It'll be interesting to see what the future brings - will we ever see a Nforce 6... for now I'll take a core 2 and 965 chipset, thank you :)

RE: well I believed it... :/

By othercents on 8/8/2006 6:54:19 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Nvidia is left out in the cold, Intel could care less about their chipsets (they'd rather sell their own)

You got to be kidding me... Intel is contracted with ATI now for chipsets. Why wouldn't they contract with Nvidia. Especially since Nvidia now has the premium video card that would be used for Intel computers. Certainly Intel is going to enable SLI on their chipsets in the future and possibly disable the ability to use Crossfire.

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RE: well I believed it... :/

By hightower204 on 8/8/2006 7:51:47 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Certainly Intel is going to enable SLI on their chipsets

Ofcourse. But it's still Intel chipsets - not Nvidia's, and that's what I meant. I think it'll be tough for Nvidia to sell chipsets for Intel or AMD cpu's in the future (Nforce).

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RE: well I believed it... :/

By kamel5547 on 8/9/2006 3:58:49 PM , Rating: 2

Well Intel would be paying Nvidia a royalty for the SLI capability. THe reason there are currently no Intel chipsets with SLI is because Nvidia (and not Intel) would not allow it.

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RE: well I believed it... :/

By RandomFool on 8/9/2006 1:42:10 PM , Rating: 2

I don't really think this is bad for NVIDIA, it's not like anything really changed for them. They are a graphics company first and as far as graphics goes there's still just ATi, NVIDIA and Intel. Ati just happens to be part of AMD now. It wouldn't make sense for NVIDIA to stop making AMD chipsets since they are still better at it than Ati and it will be awhile before AMD and Ati can create anything together like Intel does. If anything NVIDIA will probably end up making more money from this deal due to increased support from Intel.

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RE: well I believed it... :/

By Ringold on 8/10/2006 8:16:55 PM , Rating: 2

Well..

As far as being better than ATI at chipsets, I've got an ASUS board running an ATI chipset, and have been incredibly pleased..

And second..

Yes, NVIDIA makes good graphics chips, sometimes much better than ATI's generation. But when AMD and Intel both integrate graphics right on the core, and ATI makes better chipsets simply because its engineers go to bed at night with AMDs engineers, then NVIDIA better start getting better at making, well.. cell phones or something. The time frame, in terms of business, is probably not all that far off either for all of that to happen.

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silly

By johnsonx on 8/8/2006 4:37:37 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Although several sites have picked up the story that AMD will eliminate the ATI brand after the merger between the two companies is complete

That is just plain silly. I'm stunned any site would believe such a story. Maybe Fudo at the Inq.: he seems pretty gullible these days.

I do think (and hope) AMD will brand all ATI core logic for AMD processors as 'AMD', with 'ATI Radeon Graphics Core' where appropriate. Conversely, they'd have to keep the ATI brand on any Intel core logic.

RE: silly

By kattanna on 8/8/2006 4:45:13 PM , Rating: 2

i have to agree...while having good tech, patents, and people, ATI also has a good brand name which is no small thing and i seriously doubt AMD would throw away such an investment.

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