DailyTech - Distant Rumblings: ATI + AMD Marriage

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Blog: Hardware Distant Rumblings: ATI + AMD Marriage
Rahul Sood (Blog) - July 3, 2006 1:23 PM

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14 comment(s) - last by Randalllind.. on Jul 21 at 11:19 AM

If you aren’t living under a rock, you have probably heard the rumors about ATI being acquired by either Intel or AMD.

My latest article for CPU Magazine is on the rumors that have been flying around about ATi merging or being acquired by another company. I can't really say whether it's true or not because no one really knows, but due to popular request I decided to post an opinion on the potential of such a merger. I may go into a more detailed analysis in subsiquent articles depending on the feedback.

If you aren’t living under a rock, you have probably heard the rumors about ATI being acquired by either Intel or AMD. The latest rumors are heavily focused around AMD merging with ATI, and they don’t seem to be letting up. I won’t speculate this month on the accuracy of these rumors, I’m simply going to throw down my opinion on why I believe it would make sense for AMD to merge with ATI. I have studied this potential merger closely, and surprisingly enough I think it would be an amazing move for everyone involved, including Nvidia.

I believe that ATI is ripe for takeover; with a little bit of guidance and some key resources (such as support from AMD’s fabs) it could become a much more efficient entity. For the first time ever, the company has released a motherboard chipset worthy of being installed in a serious enthusiast’s machine. ATI has hidden strengths and incredible engineering that need to be leveraged, and such a merger would go a long way toward making that happen.

Put another way, ATI is a jewel that is in need of some serious polishing, and if anyone knows how to polish a jewel it’s the current management team at AMD. In the last five years, these folks have done the impossible in performing the most unprecedented corporate turnaround that our industry has ever seen.

One has to realize that ATI is a decentralized company with incredible technologies in various business units. ATI is larger than Nvidia in many markets, yet few people would know this because of Nvidia’s incredible marketing prowess. No one can deny that Nvidia’s centralized rule and its tight relationship with - link to the rest...

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By mlittl3 on 7/3/2006 1:51:45 PM , Rating: 4

Nice...I have to pay to read the rest of your speculation. I think not.

RE: Subscription required

By mjh on 7/3/2006 4:15:34 PM , Rating: 2

Why don't you check out bugmenot.com? :)

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RE: Subscription required

By Trisped on 7/5/2006 2:45:46 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
Nice...I have to pay to read the rest of your speculation. I think not.

That is apparent, since the link goes directly to the rest of the post. Most people check a link before they complain about it, or maybe I live in a fantasy world.

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RE: Subscription required

By Trisped on 7/5/2006 2:48:00 PM , Rating: 2

NVM, they changed the link before I got here.
Sorry

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RE: Subscription required

By sxr7171 on 7/4/2006 12:22:42 AM , Rating: 2

This guy is an idiot. His ramblings aren't worth reading even for free. You should have his stupid ramblings about how it is more important for Seagate to build a 15,000rpm SATA drive than to adopt perpendicular recording technology in order to "gain traction in a market they need to own." Ha Ha! This is a company that even before it's merger with Maxtor had nearly TWICE the marketshare of it's nearest competitor!

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RE: Subscription required

By Viditor on 7/4/2006 1:12:59 AM , Rating: 2

I will say that I am surprised that DailyTech is posting links to subscription sites in this section...
There should at least be a $ in front of the blog post...

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RE: Subscription required

By Anh Huynh on 7/4/2006 1:38:11 AM , Rating: 2

He wasn't allowed to do that as part of the terms of his blog, and we changed the link

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RE: Subscription required

By rahulsood on 7/4/2006 1:45:53 AM , Rating: 2

Sir, respectfully, calling me an idiot when you really know nothing about me (nor nothing about what I wrote) doesn't create a well constructed arguement.

Perhaps if you took the time to understand the hard drive article as it pertains to the halo effect you would then understand my point. I'm pretty sure Seagate understood my point seeing as many people within the hard drive industry read it and wrote me multiple emails supporting my arguements. Your "size" point means nothing to me, no one suggested that Western Digital would outgrow Seagate -- I suggest you read it again.

..and by the way, no one was discounting the capabilities of perpendicular technology.

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RE: Subscription required

By rahulsood on 7/4/2006 1:36:28 AM , Rating: 2

...er that was a mistake, sorry - I thought it was a free link.

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RE: Subscription required

By tuteja1986 on 7/4/2006 9:50:48 AM , Rating: 2

I have a bad feeling about the merger dooming ATI high end graphic card. If ATI were to drop out from that market then nvdia would get total victory and that would result in nvidia becaming lazy and not worrying about anything but money.

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RE: Subscription required

By hwhacker on 7/5/2006 4:40:15 AM , Rating: 2

I very much doubt ATi would drop out of the high-end gpu market. Not only would they continue, but we would see products from them in AMD supported technologies such as HTX (co-processors) perhaps earlier than they otherwise may have.

Also, after AMD goes four core, their next mission is to create cores within their cpus for specific operations. Floating Point operations is first iirc, who's to say a gfx-orientended core isn't somewhere beyond that?

There's a lot of places AMD could take ATi and their tech beyond using their chipsets.

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AMD & Nvidia Chipsets

By nerdboy on 7/7/2006 4:42:25 PM , Rating: 2

I wonder what this would do the AMD's Nvidia Chipsets because those are amazing.

Nvidia chipsets?

By Randalllind on 7/21/2006 11:19:58 AM , Rating: 2

Would this band Nvidia from having chipsets on AMD boards? Nvidia right now makes the best chipsets around. I hope this doesn't stop.

It will be interesting.

By Trisped on 7/5/2006 2:42:22 PM , Rating: 1

quote:
but it seems that ATi may benefit from a strong management team who can help build value by exploiting their key technologies.

I can only hope that ATI doesn’t exploit their technologies as bad as NVIDIA does. If they aren’t using their name in graphics to push a sub par chipset then they are stifling the competition buy requiring their chipsets to run SLI.

From what I have seen ATI is more interested in making products then inventing tech, a trend I hope to see more of in the future.