What does the future hold for AMD and ATI?
The
AMD-ATI merger had been rumored for months. Many took it as wild
speculation on a deal that would likely never come to fruition. Well, over the
weekend the rumors became even
more credible and yesterday AMD
made the big announcement.
FiringSquad has also completed an interview with AMD and in addition
received some colorful commentary from NVIDIA's Derek Perez;
"So if you think about it, it’s kind of like ATI’s thrown in the towel
right? Getting beat on both ends, looking for a way out, a little bit like 3dfx
a few years back." Of course, it should probably be mentioned that
NVIDIA bought 3dfx.
AMD
executive vice president Henri Richard took the opportunity to sit down and talk with DigiTimes about the ATI
acquisition and its plans for the future. In the interview, Richard talks about
the perceived risk that AMD is taking by possibly biting off more than it can
chew with the acquisition, what this means for AMD's relationship with NVIDIA
and the company's plans for graphics in general. When asked if AMD motherboards
would still use NVIDIA core logic, Richard replied "I surely hope so,
absolutely." In an interview with Bytesector,
Perez also assures us "We will continue to work with AMD to bring our
brands to our mutual customers," but warns "We are now Intel's best
GPU partner."
Cliff Edwards at BusinessWeek claims the
writing is already on the wall for disaster. AMD CEO Hector Ruiz stated
that "We will move from being neighbors to being a family," to which
Edwards immediately followed up with "the problem with families —
especially those formed by multibillion-dollar corporate mergers — is that they
often end up dysfunctional." Edwards goes on to detail why the merger is great for
NVIDIA and Intel, and detrimental for ATI and AMD.
Scott Wasson from TechReport has a very concise
outline of the details surrounding the deal, Mercury Research claims
"the holy grail of integration for ATI and AMD is going to be
an integrated processor — a combination of a graphics processor and
a processor," Forbes believes the mobile semiconductor industry will turn into a bloodbath,
TSMC assured the world its manufacturing relations with ATI will continue business as
usual, The Register believes an AMD-ATI system-on-a-chip is the only way for both companies to survive, and
finally CRN has the definitive "no" as to whether or not AMD will
produce its own line of motherboards based on ATI core logic.
And finally, Ken Fisher at Arstechnica warns that everyone should take a
breather and lay off the rampant speculation, as the deal is still not even
finalized. Specifically Fisher claims "And when it comes to claims
about motherboard licensing, ATI, NVIDIA, and chipsets, bear this one key point
in mind: this is not a done deal." However, if ATI does terminate
the agreement at this point the company will have to fork over $162M dollars to
AMD.
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