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AMD-ATI Merger on the Way?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed May 31, 2006 05:22 PM
from the by-your-powers-combined-i-am-cpt-hardware dept.
Graphics Businesses Hardware
miketronics writes "Forbes.com is reporting the possibility of a merger between industry heavyweights AMD and ATI. This is largely based on a 'prediction on recent checks in the PC food chain' by industry analyst Apjit Walia. A move like this might give AMD some leverage over Intel, who has been slashing prices lately to compete with a major surge in AMD popularity in both the home and server markets. Despite AMD's recent gains Intel still has a dominant market share and consumers have high hopes for their upcoming Conroe processors."

Related Stories

[+] Hardware: Exploring the ATI/AMD Rumor 133 comments
phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica writes about current speculation circling around the supposed imminent merger of ATI and AMD: 'Last week at Computex, however, Intel allegedly began telling folks behind closed doors that AMD is planning to acquire ATI. This news came courtesy of Tweaktown, who cited a trusted and reliable anonymous source for the claim. It wasn't clear from Tweaktown's report if Intel itself had heard a rumor to this effect, or if the company was reading the same tea leaves as the RBC Capital Markets analysts in the Forbes article and coming to the same conclusion.'"
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  • Why not Nvidia (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:25PM (#15439275)
    All I can think is why AMD ins't looking at nvidia instead? If I had my choice of companies to chose from, it wouldn't be ATI.

    • Re:Why not Nvidia (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kimvette (919543) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:41PM (#15439406) Homepage
      Amen to that.

      As far as I am concerned, ATI is evil.

      Their customer service USED to be excellent, better than other video card vendors. Unfortunately when DiamondMM lost the first video card wars and ATI got really huge, their driver quality sank very quickly and their customer service went from the best to quite possibly the worst - worse than even generic video card companies like Jaton. Not only that, they went from being quite supportive of X to being downright hostile (this change took place right around the time they bought up the charred corpse of Diamond) and REFUSED to disclose info to Linux developers, taking on the "proprietary intellectual property" mantra that Diamond used to love to chant. As if releasing "register c8e3 does foo" is going to reveal how you developed your chip mask. Idiots. Just release the map already, okay?

      ATI's drivers have become more stable in the last couple of years on the Windows side, and they've become slightly less evil in the Linux world by releasing (partially-functional - no 3D - WTF? No Radeon 7500 support? WTF!) binary drivers for X and register maps for older products, but they still have an extremely long way to go before I will consider buying any ATI products. Hell, they STILL haven't ever released a driver which will enable the tuner on any of my ATI tuner or All in Wonder cards on Linux. Even worse, the open source driver (on supported cards) significantly outperforms the proprietary driver on several systems I've tested. Also, I've never managed to get GL117 to run on ANY ATI card, but NO problems on NVidia or even Screw ATI.

      If AMD teams up with ATI, not only will I avoid ATI products, but I will also stick with Intel processors. Besides, with Intel's new cores, it's Intel's turn to babystep back into the lead again for a while. I think it's more likely that ATI's evil would rub off on AMD, and ATI would not improve any.
      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Why not Nvidia (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geobeck (924637) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @06:09PM (#15439626)
      All I can think is why AMD ins't looking at nvidia instead?

      Because nVIDIA isn't a three-letter acronym starting with A*, which is probably this analyst's rationale for starting this pump-and-dump "prediction".

      *A for "analyst", which of course starts with "anal".

      [ Parent ]

    • Re:Why not Nvidia (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chewedtoothpick (564184) <chewedtoothpick@ ... minus physicist> on Wednesday May 31 2006, @06:37PM (#15439868)
      Perhaps this is a move by AMD to help NVidia finally rid themselves of their competition from ATI. Given the close relationship that AMD and NVidia have, and AMD's dependancy on NVidia, AMD would want to do everything in their power to help NVidia lorde their power over their competitors.

      That, or perhaps AMD is seeking to relieve themselves of their dependance on NVidia, and it has become quite obvious that VIA is no longer a player in the motherboard battle. AMD Could be looking to expand their performance by making an AMD motherboard that actually is worth the silicon it's made on - just as Intel's best boards use Intel north and south bridges.
      [ Parent ]

  • Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcpkaaos (449561) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:25PM (#15439278)
    There goes the amd64 stable keyword...

  • Very unlikely, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mobby_6kl (668092) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:27PM (#15439290)
    not completely impossible or baseless, considering that ATI makes some [newegg.com] AMD-compatible chipsets.

    • Re:Very unlikely, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PixelSlut (620954) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:44PM (#15439429)
      AMD has their own chipsets, they're not buying ATI for that. The thing that AMD doesn't make of their own is integrated graphics chipsets. Intel is the largest vendor of graphics hardware (they either beat NVIDIA and ATI combined, or they come close to it). With Windows Vista coming out and requiring a GPU for Aeroglass, it totally makes sense for AMD to start producing integrated graphics solutions.
      [ Parent ]

  • quick question (Score:5, Funny)

    by friedman101 (618627) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:30PM (#15439321)
    At what percentage of market share am I supposed to stop liking AMD?

    • Re:quick question (Score:4, Funny)

      by glsunder (241984) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @08:06PM (#15440547)
      51%
      [ Parent ]

      • Re:quick question (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Fallingcow (213461) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @06:02PM (#15439564) Homepage
        AMD has had me as a customer ever since I went shopping for a budget chip a few years ago.

        Celerons sucked so much (they were still PII-based at that time, IIRC), but I didn't want to shell out for a real Pentium... then along came Duron, a line of chips that not only outperformed the Celerons by a large margin (and often at much lower clock speeds!), but were also FAR cheaper. Hell, there was a year or so there when one could buy a high-clocked Duron that would benchmark higher than many of the actual Pentium chips, and at budget-chip prices!

        Since Intel has yet to really exceed AMD in the price/value ratio since that time (though they are supposedly closing the gap when it comes to high-end chips), I've stuck with AMD. I imagine that they won over lots of other people at that time, as well--especially those who pay attention to these kinds of things (geeks).
        [ Parent ]

  • this merger would throtle Intels sales because... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brit_in_the_USA (936704) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:31PM (#15439328)
    ... Intel is very dependant on ATI at the moment to supply intel CPU compatible chip-sets/Motherboards to help Intel move it's stock pile of CPUs. As Intel has a chip-set shortage which means it can not shift CPU's as fast as it would likes. (almost every new CPU requires a new MB).

    *IF* AMD bought ATI they could immediately can the ATI Intel motherboard line and deliver a big blow to intel's profitability for the next quarter or two.

  • Doesn't make sense (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DeafDumbBlind (264205) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:31PM (#15439331)
    AMD doesn't need ATI's tech or headaches. The best chipsets for AMD's systems currently come from Nvidia; why would AMD want to piss them off?
    Nvidia's founder worked at AMD in the 80s and the 2 companies have a pretty close relationship. I can see a merger with Nvidia making sense, but buying ATI would be a blunder.

  • Can't see it happening... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RayDude (798709) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:34PM (#15439353)
    IMO this is pretty silly. AMD would be backhanding NVIDIA by doing this. And this would encourage NVIDIA and Intel to merge in response. You really don't want Intel and NVIDIA working as the same company do you? Talk about stiff competition. And this could eliminate some choices we have as consumers on chipsets and video processors. All in all this would be very bad for consumers. I can't see this happening, no matter what the analysts say. Raydude

  • What's with all the "Merge with nVidia instead" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OzPhIsH (560038) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:37PM (#15439380) Journal
    I don't want ANY of these companies to merge. I want more houses out there designing chips, pushing the limits, and enabling us to have more and more powerful rigs at a cheaper price. I don't want less competition in the sector one bit. We already only have really 2 choices for CPUs, and two different choices for GPUs. I wish there were a lot more to choose from. What I don't want is to be locked into a specific video card chipset based on whether I have an Intel or AMD CPU.

  • Pump and dump... ATI up 9% on the rumor (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DeafDumbBlind (264205) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @05:40PM (#15439402)
    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ecn?s=ATYT [yahoo.com]
    Looks like the analyst needed to justify his price upgrade so he started the rumor.
  • it's not the devil who changes.

  • I want to be an analyst! (Score:5, Funny)

    by RelliK (4466) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @07:15PM (#15440166)
    Being an analyst is awesome! Think about it: you make up wild speculation all day and people pay you for it. Next up: Amazon to buy RedHat and sell it on eBay!

    • Re:I hope not (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kimvette (919543)
      Current catalyst drivers today are perfection relative to what they were like a couple of years ago. They're a vast improvement.
    • Consumers have high hopes for Conroe? More bullshit.

      Everything I have personally read on every tech/hardware/overclocking/etc site about Conroe has been about the chips slaughtering AMD's top FX chips. The core line has got a LOT of people excited. Inte

      • I think that the point is, Intel's going to sell millions of conroes, but only a few thousand people will have bought them because of the merits discussed in technical magazines. All the other sales will be because that's what Dell put in the box.

    • Re:Consumers Don't care (Score:5, Funny)

      by lostchicken (226656) on Wednesday May 31 2006, @06:26PM (#15439769) Homepage
      Pretty sure I wouldn't be able to either. I mean, the Katami, being a much earlier chip probably has about half the number of pins that the Conroe has and might be lighter, but the Conroe uses BGA, so it'd probably hurt less, being less spiky. In the end, though, Conroe, Katami or 6502, I'd mainly just be pissed that you hit me in the head with one.
      [ Parent ]
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