AMD buys ATi for $5.4B (unified thread!)

why_ask_why said:
AMD has been keeping their moves pretty close to the chest lately so I would suspect their is something coming soon
Actually, they haven't. They have already announced that they'll counter with their 4x4 campaign. Funny thing is that the second 4 in that equation has always been provided by nVidia. Oops.
 
theacoustician said:
Will this have a big impact on IBM? Remember, 2 of the 3 consoles have their graphic chips developed by ATi and all three have processors developed by IBM. Do you think AMD could wedge themselves into the X360 and Wii or their next gen. counterparts?


I would think the contracts are all drawn and signed for the consoles set for release in the immediate future ...next gen is where they will start making noise
 
why_ask_why said:
I would think the contracts are all drawn and signed for the consoles set for release in the immediate future ...next gen is where they will start making noise
See this is where I think AMD was aiming. They aren't buying ATi for more dominance in the PC realm, they're looking to counter and dominate in the living room. That's something Intel has been trying to do for a while now.
 
bast_imret said:
I always preferred my AMD/nVidia pariring over ATi.
its all preference. Ive been using ATI since my good ol VIVO card that came before my 8500.
the only gForce i owned was my GF2MX

although i was pretty sure i was switchig back to the green side next upgrade...
 
HydroSqueegee said:
its all preference. Ive been using ATI since my good ol VIVO card that came before my 8500.
the only gForce i owned was my GF2MX

although i was pretty sure i was switchig back to the green side next upgrade...


the last non nvidia graphics card I owned was a voodoo banshee circa '97 or '98 :lol:
 
why_ask_why said:
sounds like 4x4 is fairly close and already has intel very worried
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060720-7310.html
True, but I don't know how much either is needed yet. Hell, we can't even kick 64bit into high gear yet. How many apps are going to be able to take advantage of it? I think they need to reign in power consumption and bring price down first. That 50% cut recently was sweet and I hope there's more to come. Then while they're doing that, wail on software devs to start using the features they're putting in there.
 
why_ask_why said:
the last non nvidia graphics card I owned was a voodoo banshee circa '97 or '98 :lol:

both sides make good cards, ATI has always been more affordable for my upgrade at the time. the $200 dell misprice on the 8500 when it came out was the only reason I got it. Then from there it was a good deal on a 9700 when it came out, now i have an x800xt AIW card. the $275 i paid for it last year was the most i ever paid for a card. Everything else was $200 or less.
 
theacoustician said:
True, but I don't know how much either is needed yet. Hell, we can't even kick 64bit into high gear yet. How many apps are going to be able to take advantage of it? I think they need to reign in power consumption and bring price down first. That 50% cut recently was sweet and I hope there's more to come. Then while they're doing that, wail on software devs to start using the features they're putting in there.

the hardware always has to be there first to get mainstream dev support...for vid cards usually less than a year for a ton of stuff to be out supporting the newest features...for 64bit, no one REALLY needs it yet so dev is obviously going slowly there
 
I just pick whoever's card is better when I'm buying. My last card was ATi 9500 cause they blew nVidia out of the water then. Now I have a 7800 GTX, cause they blew ATi out of the water.
 
This was needed. Im sure that if they had they way they would have purchased Nvidia, but as the story says they had to borrow money to buy ATI, before it was around 3.9 billion. If the same thing occured with Nvidia the price tag probably would have been close to 10 billion.

Anyhow this takes care of two issues that Intel has over AMD, one central location to get everything from the chipset to the processor and it also gives AMD a potential edge in technology. Its been rumored for years that AMD wants to extend the Hyper Transport bus to include video cards, physics processors, math co-processors and etc.

Lets take 4x4. What if it could actually take a quad core processor in one of the slots and the other slot could take a physics co-processor? If people were paying attention before ATI's potential solution was different than Nvidia's whos solution was to only accelerate non gameplay options such as cloth and water because everything else requires CPU assistance which would be hard to coordinate with the GPU. its possible to accelerate more on a faster bus than what PCI Express can provide.

As far as Nvidia going to Intel's side, I kind of doubt it. I think Nvidia went more with AMD from the jump because they happen to have a bunch of old AMD engineers on staff, similar to how back in the day OGL ran better because of the old SGI engineers on staff. Unless the AMD/ATI team starts to eat major marketshare Nvidia's major concern is Intel which has 60% of the video card marketplace. Expect ATI to focus on the intergrated market and Nvidia to stick with the enthusists market at least for the time being.
 
I wonder what this will mean to Ring-tailed Lemur import prices.

edit: It's most assuredly going to raise oil prices.
 
Ryokurin said:
This was needed. Im sure that if they had they way they would have purchased Nvidia, but as the story says they had to borrow money to buy ATI, before it was around 3.9 billion. If the same thing occured with Nvidia the price tag probably would have been close to 10 billion.

Anyhow this takes care of two issues that Intel has over AMD, one central location to get everything from the chipset to the processor and it also gives AMD a potential edge in technology. Its been rumored for years that AMD wants to extend the Hyper Transport bus to include video cards, physics processors, math co-processors and etc.

Lets take 4x4. What if it could actually take a quad core processor in one of the slots and the other slot could take a physics co-processor? If people were paying attention before ATI's potential solution was different than Nvidia's whos solution was to only accelerate non gameplay options such as cloth and water because everything else requires CPU assistance which would be hard to coordinate with the GPU. its possible to accelerate more on a faster bus than what PCI Express can provide.

As far as Nvidia going to Intel's side, I kind of doubt it. I think Nvidia went more with AMD from the jump because they happen to have a bunch of old AMD engineers on staff, similar to how back in the day OGL ran better because of the old SGI engineers on staff. Unless the AMD/ATI team starts to eat major marketshare Nvidia's major concern is Intel which has 60% of the video card marketplace. Expect ATI to focus on the intergrated market and Nvidia to stick with the enthusists market at least for the time being.

nvidia and ati aren't as far off as one would guess
nvidia market cap = 6.88b
ati market cap = 4.93b
 
I was kind of going by this. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amd-ati.ars/3 Either way they still had to borrow to make it happen I still figure that since Nvidia's market cap is so high allready the potential talk would have made it even higher. I guess they could have made a deal to make it cheaper if they somehow made it look like a merger of equals but it probably would have pissed some shareholders off by getting short changed. Oh well, we'll never know.
 
why_ask_why said:
wow, that's a really bad move for intel...alienating themselves from ATI leaves nvidia to rape them on pricing or deal with intel graphics which have historically sucked on monumental levels
I think it has more to do with the fact that they would be licensing their rivals to make motherboards for them, thereby giving them a leg up on what they're doing on the processor front. They haven't banished them from the separated graphics card realm, yet.