AMTI Athleon...

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AMD acquires ATI
Chip manufacturer picks up graphics-card maker for $5.4 billion in cash and shares; company promises "more integrated solutions."
By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpot
Posted Jul 24, 2006 10:40 am PT

On Friday, Reuters reported a rumored deal that would see microprocessor manufacturer AMD acquire graphics-card maker ATI was close to complete. Today, it became official.

Sunnyvale, California-based AMD today announced that it has come to an agreement to purchase ATI (headquartered in Markham, Ontario, Canada) in a deal worth roughly $5.4 billion in cash and shares. Each company's board of directors voted for the deal unanimously; now the acquisition must meet the approval of ATI shareholders and US and Canadian regulatory bodies before it can be finalized.

AMD has said that ATI will continue to make the specialized, high-end graphics cards it was known for, but that it will also work more on integrated graphics solutions. The company expects earnings per share to increase slightly next year, and "meaningfully" in 2008. Also by 2008, AMD anticipates its operating expenses to be down by about $75 million.

An ATI representative told GameSpot that any layoffs due to the merger would likely be minimal. "It's too early to say, but for the most part there's no overlap within the company," the representative said. ATI currently employs 4,200 people, and the postmerger AMD is expected to employ approximately 14,900.

As of press time, shares of AMD were off a little more than 4 percent from Friday's closing price, trading down $0.80 to $17.46. On the other hand, shares of ATI received a significant boost on the news, jumping more than 18 percent, up $3.03 to $19.59
What would this mean for both ATI and AMD, will it change alot or not? I wonder...
 
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This means you can expect some serious advantages to having an ATi Powered AMD system in the future. ATi's sloppy driver support might tighten up a bit, and AMD's manufacturing processes will like gain from ATi's fabrication techniques. You may also see AMD fuel it's R&D with ATi's proceeds.
 
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I'm worried about how this will impact the nForce series. It's been dominate for AMD processors... I believe they released the first nForce for Intel chips a year or so ago. I wonder if this means nVidia will gear nForce more towards Intel chips... that would suck.

Not to mention, being an nVidiot, this kind of makes me awry about AMD. I've always loved nVidia, hated ATI, and loved AMD, hated Intel. But I wouldn't want either company from either part (processor or graphics processor) to get too dominant. Competition drives down prices, and is good for research and development.
 
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I doubt it would impact it very much. AMDs are still preferable with gamers, and even with Conroe coming out, AMD will still command a not-ignorable market chunk.

Nvidia will continue to make the Nforce brand chipsets almost garaunteed.
 
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Sicron said:
What would this mean for both ATI and AMD, will it change alot or not? I wonder...
Heh, you can see an image from the inquirer in as my sig :).
AMD had to borrow some money from a financing company in order to buy out ATI, also ATI gets 57million shares aswell in AMD.
A few links:
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33257
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33230
http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33238 (With AMD now owning ATI, ATI has lost their chipset liscense with intel, for reasons possibly relating to product competition now that AMD has aquired ATI, 80% of ATI's revenue accordingly seem to come from their intel line of their mainboards based on their chipsets).
Cucumba said:
I doubt it would impact it very much. AMDs are still preferable with gamers, and even with Conroe coming out, AMD will still command a not-ignorable market chunk.

Nvidia will continue to make the Nforce brand chipsets almost garaunteed.
Hence why i'm building a Athlon64 X2 based system for my friend given the massive price drops that have occured here recently, I can get a S939 Athlon64 X2 3800+ for $199 Australian dollars, and AM2 version for about $21 more then the S939 version. The price before the price drops for a S939 X2 3800+ was about $345, so that's a price cut of about $146, which is nice :).
 
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Maybe if the ATI people open up their drivers a bit, I can gain a little respect for them....

Better yet, why don't they just make available some documentation, and people can write their own drivers for the various chipsets?

nVidia's drivers aren't exactly open-source (or documented well), but they are PHENOMENAL on all supported platforms.

Oh well, we can only hope...
 
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I guess you've never tried to enable Triple buffering in Direct3D then.

Nvidia FTL. ATI is a monster and I'm glad they will be pairing up with AMD. I hope they come out with something that smashes Nforce into oblivion, hehe.
 
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Easy there tiger . . . lol. While I like my ATi card's crisp color and beautiful-at-a-fps-price graphics, I do hate their almost whimsical support for their drivers.

nVidia's colors are, well, not so pretty. I find it ironic that nVidia is taking the old position of 3DFX, where they used to champion color clarity and image quality, they now play for FPS only.

I really do like the nForce Platform though, I'm running a MSI nForce2, and it's probably the best motherboard I've ever owned. I will likely build a nForce4 or 5x system next. And my ATi cards run like gold on them :p
 
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On the front of image quality, ATI supposedly is better, especially when aa and af is applied and is yet still to be matched by nvidia. Come to think of it now, this gives ATI the option to use one of AMD's chip fabs to produce their GPUs some time in the near future (all current designs for upcoming ATI cards at the moment are 80nm parts, and that's what TSMC, so to them it gives them the option of where to have their products made).

This makes me wonder what will happen with nvidia's nforce chipsets on the AMD side of things, will they have their chipset liscense with AMD renewed when it runs out?. I can only wait and see.
 
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Guess this seals the deal. ATI is now dead to me. Originally, I was an nVidia fangirl until I finally leaped over on the upper-9800 series. And then ATI lost the lead, and has yet to regain it.

And now Intel is taking the crown back from AMD, and AMD has next to nothing to fight back with except "price cuts."

Overlord's Sig said:
That will screw Nvidia! That will screw Intel!
It doesn't screw anyone. Two losing companies together aren't exactly a good match for two "kings."
 
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SailorAlea said:
Guess this seals the deal. ATI is now dead to me. Originally, I was an nVidia fangirl until I finally leaped over on the upper-9800 series. And then ATI lost the lead, and has yet to regain it.

And now Intel is taking the crown back from AMD, and AMD has next to nothing to fight back with except "price cuts."



It doesn't screw anyone. Two losing companies together aren't exactly a good match for two "kings."

AMD has more to fight back with than you think. Conroe is nifty, but only a shift in philosophy from Intel's way of thinking to AMD's. When certain technologies available only to those with SOI become available, Intel is going to look stupid. Again.

Of course this will take time, but that is how the processor industry rolls. AMD was on borrowed time, now that Intel's figured out what they were doing wrong, AMD has to make good with it's gained profits and do something with them. I'm still a staunch supporter of AMDs engineers, and I think that they will out-think intel again given some time.
 
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SaiyanPrideXIX said:
I guess you've never tried to enable Triple buffering in Direct3D then.

Nvidia FTL. ATI is a monster and I'm glad they will be pairing up with AMD. I hope they come out with something that smashes Nforce into oblivion, hehe.
That just proof how little you know of the subject at hand.

AMD actually encouraged nVidia to keep making nForce chipsets for AMD platforms.
AMD encouraged an openmarket for its chipsets as it doesnt want to be like Intel.(See latest rumors on RD600 being denied for Intel's Core 2 Duo platform; http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33225, http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=33238)

@Cucumba,

Not only will AMD benefit from it, so will ATi.
According to the latest rumors, FAB36 in Dresden can possibly also produce GPU's.
This could mean that ATi wont have to be dependent on UMC and TSMC for their chipset/GPU production.

AMD will have a big comeback with the K8L to reclaim the performance crown, set for early 2007.

And you dont have to be afraid that Intel will take-over nVidia, as nVidia offers no advantage to Intel marketing strategy.
Intel has it's own GPU and chipset division already.
 
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SailorAlea said:
Guess this seals the deal. ATI is now dead to me. Originally, I was an nVidia fangirl until I finally leaped over on the upper-9800 series. And then ATI lost the lead, and has yet to regain it.

And now Intel is taking the crown back from AMD, and AMD has next to nothing to fight back with except "price cuts."



It doesn't screw anyone. Two losing companies together aren't exactly a good match for two "kings."
The image is there mainly for the humour of it =P. I usually get amazed by what tech the companies come up with and then decide from there what I prefer (as seen many times before comnig from a lot of different views/points). There are lots and lots and lots of things to consider while going through and chosing pc specs and from what you know of them (Netburst was power hungry, despite intel's efforts to reduce the power consumption of the design, AMD's 90nm parts consume less power, Intel was just practically shrinknig a already power hungry design onto a smaller die, however it's good for them cause it saves them on production costs and more chips per wafer, intel's chips also used DDR2 memory which has reduced voltage requirements compard to normal ddr memory. However when it comes down to the consumer purchasing a intel chip, using the product, it's there consuming more power then what the competition offered, and AMD took the performance crown for quite some time, however nowa days you look to also consider upgrade paths, with AMD haulting production on S939 soon enough and moving to AM2, an upgrade path of a S939 system is limited to better chips produced for that socket while AMD is going to be making it's new future gen chips on AM2, and people want that. Intel chipsets supporting conroe are 965, 975 abliet some 975 (some variants don't support it, 975x does support it however), nforce4 SLI edition apparently supports conroe through a bios update, and nvidia is going tyo release nforce5 for intel too, so board support becomes a crucial aspect considering the upgrade path).

Man, I listed so much stuff there that probably comes down to facts.
Devion said:
AMD will have a big comeback with the K8L to reclaim the performance crown, set for early 2007.
Agreed.
Intel has it's own GPU and chipset division already.
I always frown upon there intergrated gfx, their next big GPU is rumoured to be just a craptacular 2pipe SM4 chip, but then again what can you really expect from onboard gfx (ATI's approach though on intergrated gfx actually offeres some decent performance though in terms of what you can do with it in comparision to what intel, VIA or S3 would practically offer you). It would be a bonus if ATI decided to produce a onboard GPU that offered AVIVO features, though :).
 
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Who actually uses integrated graphics though? Every pre-built system advertised this year has had some form of GFX card (as low as GeForce 2 :p).
 
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Ravendust said:
Who actually uses integrated graphics though? Every pre-built system advertised this year has had some form of GFX card (as low as GeForce 2 :p).
OEM market is where onboard gfx is mainly used, plus on some mainboards. You see a lot of OEM companies using intergrated gfx for their products.
Come to think of it, with Dell considering using AMD chips currently, it will give ATI a market to provide chipsets & intergrated Graphics to those products.
 
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I remember the discussion on an alternate forum about this that went something like this:

"Lolz, this won't happen."
"Lolz, this won't happen."
"Lolz, this won't happen."
-Happens-
"Lolz, I knew this would happen."
Ravendust said:
Who actually uses integrated graphics though? Every pre-built system advertised this year has had some form of GFX card (as low as GeForce 2 ).
Heh, intel literally owns the VPU market with its integrated stuff, as in 70-80%.

Now for the people who don't really know where this is going: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amd-ati.ars
 
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Smith| said:
Now for the people who don't really know where this is going: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amd-ati.ars
Interesting article, and now I see the wisdom in purchasing ATi. It's interesting to note that nVidia's SLI has a fatal bandwidth flaw not shared by ATi's Crossfire. Crossfire needs to mature some, but I fully believe it will become the dual card solution of choice with time.
 
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From what I saw researching vid cards Crossfire rules. Two x800s over Crossfire outperformed virtually every card I noted by a large margin. Though I was only looking at a small amount of cards at the time, the top of the heap was always Crossfire.

I want to get a new comp with an nForce4 mobo but I don't want to bother if in a year I'm going to have to chuck it for a Crossfire one.

@Cuc: I find the Catalyst drivers to be very flexible, MUCH more flexible then Nvidia's options. I also just hate the way Nvidias look...you know what I mean? Duller color, sharper jags, more blocky poly-like shapes being visible. Weird glitchiness with shadow and light. That sort of thing. I mean whoop dee doo, they get a million frames a second...the image quality seems notably worse to me, so I'd rather be capped at 85 and have it look comfortable to me then get a nasty framerate and feel like I'm looking at worse image quality.

God damn I love that truform ****, man....
 
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SaiyanPrideXIX said:
From what I saw researching vid cards Crossfire rules. Two x800s over Crossfire outperformed virtually every card I noted by a large margin. Though I was only looking at a small amount of cards at the time, the top of the heap was always Crossfire.

I want to get a new comp with an nForce4 mobo but I don't want to bother if in a year I'm going to have to chuck it for a Crossfire one.

@Cuc: I find the Catalyst drivers to be very flexible, MUCH more flexible then Nvidia's options. I also just hate the way Nvidias look...you know what I mean? Duller color, sharper jags, more blocky poly-like shapes being visible. Weird glitchiness with shadow and light. That sort of thing. I mean whoop dee doo, they get a million frames a second...the image quality seems notably worse to me, so I'd rather be capped at 85 and have it look comfortable to me then get a nasty framerate and feel like I'm looking at worse image quality.

God damn I love that truform ****, man....
If you are so on graphics, then why take crossfire with the x800?
Crossfire(Only the X serie, not the X1) is limited to 1600x1200 @ 60hz.(So there goes your "so I'd rather be capped at 85 and have it look comfortable...." story)

nVidia doesnt have weird glitches, dont make some bull**** up.

nVidia only dont have independent angle AFiltering, which you dont notice running and shooting through a level, but it could be anoying.

But then again ATi has got texture crawling(In some cases, both Radeon and nVidia have it, most of the time ATi though), which is just as anoying as independent AFiltering.

Also ATi has sucky support in Linux or other OS.

nVidia drivers menu may not look shiny like ATi(Although there is alternative skin and layout now), but its 1000x more efficient IMO.

ATi has HDR+AA and nVidia doesn't except Half-Life 2.

New Geforce serie(7) runs more quiet and cooler then the Radeon's X1 serie delivering the same performance.

Both cards have their own strong and weak points, there isnt a clear superiour GFX maker.
So dont be so ATi-biased and go and pick up an nVidia card sometime. You'll be surprised how well they work and especially the user friendly driver menu.
 

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