It's Official — AMD Will Retire the ATI Brand 324
J. Dzhugashvili writes "A little over four years have passed since AMD purchased ATI. In May of last year, AMD took the remains of the Canadian graphics company and melded them into a monolithic products group, which combined processors, graphics, and platforms. Now, AMD is about to take the next step: kill the ATI brand altogether. The company has officially announced the move, saying it plans to label its next generation of graphics cards 'AMD Radeon' and 'AMD FirePro,' with new logos to match. The move has a lot to do with the incoming arrival of products like Ontario and Llano, which will combine AMD processing and graphics in single slabs of silicon."
Let The Confustion Begin (Score:1, Insightful)
I assume there's going to be an AMD Radeon sticker next to the Intel Inside sticker. I can't wait to sort out the confused people around me thinking there are two physical CPUs, one from each manufacturer, in that computer. In addition to consolidating its brand presence,I suppose they think this will reduce confusion when IMHO it will create more confusion for a while.
Re:Let The Confustion Begin (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't wait to sort out the confused people around me thinking there are two physical CPUs
I'd imagine that the only people who care to hear about the internals of your computer (if any) will be able to figure it out for themselves.
fglrx (Score:4, Insightful)
..can they retire that too? please?
Re:Let The Confustion Begin (Score:5, Insightful)
The confusion is that most regular people are only marginally aware of an AMD/Intel distinction, although don't know what it means, and don't know at all ATI or nVidia.
Fixed that for you.
Opportunity knocking for AMD here... (Score:5, Insightful)
...AMD's prepping for their integrated CPU/GPU launch. ...
I would image that better Linux drivers might come down the pipeline, though...they'd definitely loose out on a potential market if they completely ignored the issue.
I'd go one step further and say that I think that AMD has an opportunity to highlight their hardware here.
Intel's CPUs and integrated graphics have long had great support in the Linux kernel. Because Intel controls the tech, they can actually provide the correct and full source for the graphics drivers. The problem is that Intel integrated graphics aren't ever anything special.
If AMD is seriously working on integrating their graphics cards and processors -- perhaps even onto the same die -- then they have an opportunity to provide a much more powerful, integrated hardware platform with fully-open drivers. Intel can't compete with that kind of setup, especially as NVidea appears to have an aversion to opening the source to their graphics card drivers.
Re:Great news (Score:1, Insightful)
It's very relevant, because it means that the electricity, which is moving even slower than photons (about 2/3 c) travels less than 10 cm in one cycle
Re:WTF how is this offtopic? (Score:3, Insightful)
>it will fool the people they told to never buy ATI.
who would be so irresponsible as to tell someone that?
Re:Great news (Score:1, Insightful)
More cycles does not have anything to do with the original poster's point. He's not saying you can't go above 3GHz he's saying it's a point of diminishing returns as there are more empty cycles while the chip waits for stuff from external sources which can no longer arrive in a single clock cycle.
Re:Great news (Score:5, Insightful)
We're not, but even if we were, that's the fundamental limit. Electricity traveling slower than this makes the problem worse.
You've clearly misunderstood his post, so adding insults just makes you look foolish.
No we wouldn't. If it can't be done in one clock cycle, it'll be done in two (or more). Who said anything about this limiting clock speed?
Anyway, at a higher clock speed, the problem becomes even more pronounced. With a 3.8 GHz clock, a signal at the speed of light only travels 7.9 cm during one clock cycle (but let's estimate about 6.5 cm for electricity).
Re:WTF how is this offtopic? (Score:3, Insightful)
who would be so irresponsible as to tell someone that?
Friends don't let friends buy ATI. I will no longer attempt to help friends with ATI driver problems because usually the answer is "you're fucked" or "become a driver developer" which is the same thing. I can't remember the last time I had an ATI graphics solution with which I've had zero problems, because that has never happened and I have used hardware from almost every generation of ATI graphics chips. Wait, that's no true, there was one combination I had no graphics problems with, Mach32 on NT3.51. But with Mach64 came a driver complex enough to prove that ATI couldn't write drivers, and the rest is history... a painful chapter of history I'd like to burn.
Re:Great news (Score:3, Insightful)
The same thing happened with math coprocessors. I once had an AMD Am386 chip with an Intel 80387 floating point chip. With the 486 CPU series Intel fully integrated the floating point functions in the same chip as the CPU.
I don't think the market for separate graphics chips will last much longer. The only way to get more performance out of CPUs now is by adding cores and it makes sense to let the CPU use the GPU cores. Integrating graphic functions in the CPU seems inevitable by now.
Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand. There were two major manufacturers of CPUs and two major manufacturers of GPUs before the merger, exactly the same number as after the merger. Where is your problem exactly?
I personally see problems elsewhere. One example is ebay, the online auction monopoly, being allowed to not only buy paypal, but also disallow any other payment system...
Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it wasn't a merger. It was a hostile takeover of the US government.
And it's been going on for decades. September, 2008 was just the closing party.
Re:WTF how is this offtopic? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what you are talking about. I have had just as many Nvidia problems as ATI in the past. Currently, I have no ATI driver problems.
You and the sibling poster are in the minority. This would be a nice application for a Slashdot poll which would prove it. Vast numbers of slashdotters have reported ATI problems and nVidia solutions. ATI is constantly going backwards; on my R690M chipset (R2xx graphics) ati driver causes display corruption and r2xx is no longer supported by fglrx. Not long ago this was a currently shipping chipset and yet ATI actually offered no working driver on any OS but Vista. (I am using Windows 7 now and Suspend/Resume is broken, works with VGA driver.) This is just my latest in a long line of pathetic ATI failures, and I should have known better but I figured the graphics would be old enough to work under the ati driver. Nope. ATI is too incompetent to themselves reimplement their old hardware without causing driver problems! If that doesn't tell you what you need to know about ATI, nothing will.
Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 (Score:2, Insightful)
Your hardware can be as good as possible but with no drivers or crap driver to run the hardware, whats the point. Bar-none the saving grace for ATI is being bought by AMD, now we have good hardware being ran by good software and not good hardware being slugged out by bad software.
Re:Justice Department on vacation since 1980 (Score:3, Insightful)
Before AMD bought ATI:
- Intel
- AMD
- nVidia
- ATI
If AMD dies, ATI is still there. You have no choice but to buy intel, but you can at least choose between nVidia and ATI.
After AMD bought ATI:
- Intel
- AMD+ATI
- nVidia
If AMD dies, ATI dies too. You have no choice but to buy intel and nVidia.
I'm guessing a lot of slashdot users are too young to be able to remember that in the past years and decades, sometimes AMD was better than Intel, sometimes the other way around. Same thing goes for ATI and nVidia.
Just because one company is better than the other today doesn't mean it'll always be this way. Even Intel can screw things up. See "Pentium 4".
Re:Opportunity knocking for AMD here... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure exactly what you're playing but anything with decent graphics post 2002 is pretty much a snail fest on even the newest on board intel gfx.
Hell, I still get lag on my laptop Intel Integrated gfx on Baldurs Gate sometimes. Thats what, 1996?
Video card article (Score:3, Insightful)
* My [Nvidia/ATI] anecdote trumps your [Nvidia/ATI] anecdote. You are stupid for buying their products.
* [Nvidia/ATI] has terrible drivers. You are stupid for buying their products.
* [Nvidia/ATI] produced hardware with a design flaw 25 generations ago. I will never buy their hardware again.
* Based on my comprehensive study of one graphics card, here is my 100% accurate assessment of the failure rate of every graphics card [Nvidia/ATI] produces. I will never buy their hardware again.
* Here's an opinion I formed more than ten years ago. Presumably it's still relevant because technology moves so incredibly slowly. You are stupid for buying [Nvidia/ATI]'s products.