AMD and ATI merger rumors starting to look true

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Doing great things for their stock.. no reason to believe they won't get shareholder approval.

It's a logical step.. AMD needs a GPU / Chipset team to compete in the mobile and business platform market. This will create much more competition there (which is of course good), but I don't think it will affect the high-end enthusiast market as heavily at all.

I for one am very pleased with my A8R-MVP, and it's only a first revision. I expect a lot of good ATI chipset based AMD motherboards to follow.

Intel and nVidia are competitors, I highly doubt we'll see any deals in the works between them soon.
 
god damn
i feel bad for my dad
I knew he should have sold at $42, the share prices are tumbling
 
Nvidia made AMD, and Nvidia can break AMD just as easily. Without Nforce motherboards, AMD is nothing. Maybe AMD is hoping that if they merge with ATI, that they can produce good, cheap crossfire motherboards and completely cut Nvidia out of the picture, thus increasing profits.
 
dagon11985 said:
Nvidia made AMD, and Nvidia can break AMD just as easily. Without Nforce motherboards, AMD is nothing. Maybe AMD is hoping that if they merge with ATI, that they can produce good, cheap crossfire motherboards and completely cut Nvidia out of the picture, thus increasing profits.

What???

AMD - Founded 1969
nVidia - Founded 1993

The only thing nVidia did for AMD was produce good chipsets for the Athlon series. You're deluded if you think nVidia can "break" AMD. :confused:

If anything, IBM made AMD by demanding two chip sources for the first microprocessor PCs. Intel themselves tried to break AMD by bogarting i386, and AMD still prevailed.

This acquisition is NOT about producing cheap Crossfire motherboards. Hell, I already own one (A8R-MVP). It's about AMD competing in the mobile / business platform market. They're expanding as they continue to take market share from Intel - it's a step in the right direction for them and a sign of their success if anything.
 
ryuen said:
For the moment it's all 'rumors' or a 'a source close to ..' talk.

ie. its means nothing, besides it's illogical.. AMD buying the nr 1 competitor of their nr1 chipset maker? I'll believe it when I see it from AMD ATI.

Could be like a friend killing a friend's worst enemy............ Feasible. I mean they could gut ATI and make it a low end gpu maker only or some such... Very Feasible.

~Adam
 
It's about AMD competing in the mobile / business platform market

This is exactly it... what do you guys say here? QFT.

The dells of the world are what AMD has been trying to take a slice of for a loooong time.

Dell recently agreed to, finally, offer AMD solutions... now dell would have never ever agreed to such a deal if the capability was not there to provide an entire platform solution... not just CPUs!

AMD has the advantage of still being a preferred enterprise solution... the opteron will compete well even with woodcrest... it's the large buisness/mass desktop market that intel has owned for a while... and AMD has been trying to get a piece of that for years... they have filed suits... they have done everything they can on their own and being able to offer more then just CPU's will be a good step.

Enthusiasts are just one tiny part of the picture...
 
InorganicMatter said:
I don't loathe AMD anymore, A64 X2 cured me of that, I just dislike AMD because they are so overpriced.

If they are overpriced, then why do they sell so well? What? AMD charges what the market bears like every other business that wants to survive? Oh, ok, glad that got cleared up :rolleyes:
 
I think an AMD ATi merger would be great.
Remember, merging two companies in the same relative industry does NOT create a 'fatter' company, quite the opposite. The synergies developed will allow both companies to leverage eachother's assets (both phsical and intellectual) which will actually result in a company being able to do more with less.
 
InorganicMatter said:
I like it for that simple reason.


And then "bye bye" not only to ANY GPU competition, but also ANY CPU competition? Are you nuts? My game machine cost me $3.5K. Dell's $9K XPS game system might become the normal price for such a machine if there's no competition.
 
InorganicMatter said:
If performance stays stagnant then programmers would actually have to make an effort to improve software. Imagine that :eek:

Yes, you are certifiably nuts...

Only one CPU manuf. Only one GPU manuf. No competition.

Microsoft's response? "Damn! We better make a better OS!"


:confused:
 
If the leapfrogging in hardware stopped, then the software would have to start improving. Instead of having to buy a new video card every six months, it'd be a new software revision. $50 software > $500 hardware purchase.
 
dagon11985 said:
Nvidia made AMD, and Nvidia can break AMD just as easily. Without Nforce motherboards, AMD is nothing.

You're missing the point. If AMD adopted a one processor with one chipset sales policy, like Intel has in the past, then nForce is dead. Enthusiasts don't buy enough motherboards at retail to keep nVidia profitable, they depend on companies like HP and eMachines for their profits. Then, if they decided to include a graphics processor for 'free' in every chipset, nVidia would lose out on most of its add-in graphics card sales. Mom doesn't need a 7900GT to surf the Internet, a built-in X300 is more then enough. All of this would lock nVidia out of the market, especially since they're not so cozy with Intel. They have nowhere to go. Unless nVidia happens to be working on a deal of their own (which is possible - they are a takeover target as well), their board of directors must be very frightened right now.
 
One question I've had throughout this whole rumour thing - why not nVidia? Perhaps the AMD/nVidia relationship isn't as good as we think?
 
InorganicMatter said:
If the leapfrogging in hardware stopped, then the software would have to start improving. Instead of having to buy a new video card every six months, it'd be a new software revision. $50 software > $500 hardware purchase.
I definitely agree that if hardware did stop advancing, we would be seeing a huge change in how software was developed. However, software would also become significantly more expensive then it is now (probably to the point of overshadowing the money saved from not upgrading hardware).

For instance, if Moore's law was broken and hardware stopped advancing, programmers would most likely step away from high level languages like Java (which have relatively sloppy system resource management) and start using a lot more low level languages like assembly. While this has the potential to make software far more efficient it also takes way longer to code. In fact it would probably take several times as many man hours to develop a piece of software in assembly as it would take to do in Java. As a result you could expect to see software costing several times as much (and I would also suspect that software updates which were once free would begin to cost money).

In either case, this argument is academic. AMD / ATI have business analysts who see things and know things that we don't. Also, neither ATI or AMD are in serious financial issues right now, so there's no way that would be doing this merger if it was as risky as some peoople are making it sound.
 
Wonder if this was planned (by AMD) long before the Conroe, in order to gain more marketshare from Intel?
I hope not that the Conroe/new intigrated Intel GPU will make this a bad move...we need more than one player in the market to benefit us consumers...

Terra...
 
Also, neither ATI or AMD are in serious financial issues right now, so there's no way that would be doing this merger if it was as risky as some peoople are making it sound.

yes, these kinds of things start as talks between the two many months before.

Alot of things are happening that are not coincedence... take dell's agreement to use AMD chips in desktops... now they would never do that unless AMD could offer an entire platform.

I think this is a smart move by AMD and by ATI. Both companies can use each other's expertise... I think we will see better GPUs eventually from ATI and perhaps better platforms from AMD that contain advantages of the merger.

AMD and ATI are both 2nd in their market... yet they both are in the black and doing ok... I think it makes sense to team up.

I work in a buisness where alot of mergers and aquisitions occur... and a few that I have been part of have turned out well. There has to be a good synergy between merging groups and if everyone likes each other (it's actually a big deal) the resulting group can be more tight and efficient then as seperates. Usually this works best when both groups have assets the other could use to work better in the market. You need good executive leadership, and you can't be afraid to let go the hardasses that hate change.
 
InorganicMatter said:
If performance stays stagnant then programmers would actually have to make an effort to improve software. Imagine that :eek:

Hmm, i really don't think that's going to happen.
 
Terra said:
Wonder if this was planned (by AMD) long before the Conroe, in order to gain more marketshare from Intel?

I'm sure this deal has been in the works for a long time - if it's to get shareholder approval on Monday then it wasn't started last week. These things usually start out with the CEOs having dinner and agreeing in principal to the aquisition. Then they each pick out their favourite SVP and get them to hammer out the details.
 
Anyone that will post "Why not nVidia and AMD, Green and Green".. or "Why not ATi and Intel".. I'll tell you why...

It is because AMD and ATi are like Christmas!
 
Borgschulze said:
Anyone that will post "Why not nVidia and AMD, Green and Green".. or "Why not ATi and Intel".. I'll tell you why...

It is because AMD and ATi are like Christmas!

Or they couldn't afford Nvidia?
 
I'd like to see the offspring of a marriage of AMD's cHT with ATI's ringbus. :eek: :cool:
 
SharpieFiend said:
One question I've had throughout this whole rumour thing - why not nVidia? Perhaps the AMD/nVidia relationship isn't as good as we think?


Captain obvious there...

I would think ATi and AMD would make a very good match. Especially since ATi has rights to Intel bus designs.

Hate to say it but nvidia has been slipping.
 
that's true they have... in a way ATI is miles ahead of nvidia.

Lets see... ATI has been first with many new technologies... they also have a unified shader arch. chip already in production in the xbox 360!

crossfire has been ATI's most high profile blunder recently... their previous blunder, the paper launch of the x1800, has been long forgotten.

but crossfire will be refined and reworked and I think it will be decent the next generation.

ATI put together a great logic chipset in record time... the x1x00 series has turned out to be pretty good afterall... I also think that ATI has a great manufacturing process.

The only area I can think of where nvidia pwns the market (now and near future), is the workstation graphics market... lets face it... the quadro is miles ahead of the fireGL, and not only that, but nvidia has a mature linux driver set, and also a decent GPU accellerated renderer (gelato).
 
BBA said:
Captain obvious there...

I would think ATi and AMD would make a very good match. Especially since ATi has rights to Intel bus designs.

Hate to say it but nvidia has been slipping.

Yeah, if ATI can make their multi-card solution as good as NVIDIA's (meaning no more "dongle", no more master/slave thing, a dual-GPU card for each generation, and support for four GPUS), they would have it made IMO.

Of course, if NVIDIA could fix their image quality problem, they would have it made too.
 
none of that stuff matters in their core market.

I meantioned ATI's crossfire blunder, but in reality, enthusiasts that would buy a dual GPU solution are just a tiny slice of the market in dollar amounts...

The problem is the enthusiasts are the most vocal... and the publicity that this market generates ripples into everything else. luckily, dual GPU support effects such a small amount of people that it doesn't really matter that much. as long as crossfire generates alot of bungholiomarks or whatever your average guy doesn't care how it's hooked up because he isn't getting it anyway.
 
Yashu said:
none of that stuff matters in their core market.

I meantioned ATI's crossfire blunder, but in reality, enthusiasts that would buy a dual GPU solution are just a tiny slice of the market in dollar amounts...

The problem is the enthusiasts are the most vocal... and the publicity that this market generates ripples into everything else. luckily, dual GPU support effects such a small amount of people that it doesn't really matter that much. as long as crossfire generates alot of bungholiomarks or whatever your average guy doesn't care how it's hooked up because he isn't getting it anyway.

But aren't NVIDIA and ATI pretty much equal short of multi-card and image quality?

I don't think there's much difference between the 6200 and the X300, and if there is a difference, the people using those cards aren't going to notice or care.
 
yes exactly, I guess that is what I was getting at.

In my corporate experience, it did not matter if it was ATI or nvidia, as long as it wasn't too expensive...

the only time it matters has been the times we needed a graphics workstation box... and then it is always nvidia... because they just offer more in this market... better drivers, better support, nifty toys, more compatable, faster, ect.

but this market is so small that ATI only needs to offer *something* that is a little cheaper.

even the CAD boxes it doesn't matter if ATI or nvidia...

In the corporate world, if you get better then integrated video you are lucky... and ATI can provide that sort of platform support for AMD.
 
This is going to be interesting to see how it shakes out, I dont' have much for or against, but want to comment on a couple things that have been said:

BBC said:
I would think ATi and AMD would make a very good match. Especially since ATi has rights to Intel bus designs.

If the purchase happens, ATI would lose right to those designs very quickly :) And if they try to use any of them after they lose the rights, that's a quick lawsuit.

Yashu said:
ATI put together a great logic chipset in record time... the x1x00 series has turned out to be pretty good afterall... I also think that ATI has a great manufacturing process.

ATI doesn't have a manufacturing process, they contract it out to TSMC. what would be interesting is IF this acquisition happens, if the new company would do in house manufacturing of ATI's products or if they would contract it out. I suspect it would stay contracted...AMD can't spare fab space for chipsets/GPUs since that would take away from CPU production, and transferring a product from one fab to another is not trivial.
 
well I doubt that they would stop using their existing contractors.
 
Intel really can't afford to buy anyone right now.. Not because they don't have the $, but because they are currently under the monopoly microscope due to Amd's lawsuit..
Intel + Nv = forget about it.. No merger, atleast not near term anyway..

If Amd wants to compete with Intel in the low cost home pc segment, they need an all in one, one stop shopping, fully integrated solution.. Where they have control of the pricing.. They currently can't make Nv or Ati sell their chipsets at a certain price to whom they want them sold.. But if they own Ati, they would gain availability and pricing controll over those integrated chipsets Ati makes... Making sure Dell or the like gets first crack at integrated gpu chipsets AND cpus at the price point Amd needs to sell them...

Ati could end up having a dedicated fab to play with, instead of paying someone else to actually produce the chips they design.. As well as access to the intilectual property that Amd owns..
 
I wonder if the SEC would even approve it, with AMD sueing Intel and all right now.
 
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