AMD <3 ATI (and Vader sessions)

It's all about the chipsets (baby) at IT Blogwatch, in which AMD merges with ATI. Not to mention Steven Frailey's homage to James Earl Jones...

Let's ignore the graphics aspects of ATI's activities and concentrate on ATI's chipsets -- the glue between CPUs and the rest of the system. L'Inq's Fuad Abazovic has "an extraordinarily reliable source":

AMD and ATI will on Monday pitch their shareholders with the proposition that the two companies merge. It's an interesting idea - AMD doesn't quite have the shekels in the bank to buy ATI outright. The deal, subject to shareholder approval, may still founder. If the deal goes through, Nvidia and its SNAP partnership with AMD will definitely be reconsidered and Nvidia will all of a sudden become a super underdog compared to the new juggernaut. It may also stop the endless bickering between ATI and Nvidia that's entertained the world+dog for some years now. AMD will be glad to get its hands on ATI's very profitable handheld division. The firm needs good chipsets and will also benefit from a great consumer digital chip segment. It will also like the integrated graphics business and will now get a piece of this action.

Kyle Fox is anxious:

Rumors of AMD acquiring ATI have been floating around the blogosphere and tech news sites for a while now. Things really heated up this weekend after speculation that a deal was planned for Monday (July 25/06) and a price tag of $5.5 billion was mentioned. Until now, I think those rumors were pretty much unsubstantiated — neither AMD nor ATI were confirming anything — but it looks like the rumors may indeed be true ... Something I’m anxious to see is how this will affect the price of PCs. Consolidations like this reduce the number of suppliers that vendors need to deal with, which it turn leads to lower procurement costs. In addition to AMD and ATI’s stock prices, I’m going to be seeing how this deal (assuming it goes through tomorrow) affects PC vendors like HP and Dell.

Aussie John Gillooly was in the right timezone to see the news cross the wires:

Holy chip! AMD actually did buy ATI ... After months of rumor CPU maker AMD has announced the acquisition of ATI for US $5.4 billion ... This single move dramatically changes the computing landscape, especially in the desktop sector where AMD and ATI both supply market leading, complementary products. AMD competes strongly with Intel in the CPU market, but until now Intel has shared a strong relationship with ATI (including technology licensing agreements). On the flip side ATI’s chief competitor for its graphics and emerging chipset business, NVIDIA, has historically had a strong relationship with AMD ... This just made the semiconductor industry interesting again.

Anandtech's Anand Lal Shimpi worries for ATI's main competitor:

As soon as you bring up the idea of a merger, everyone immediately asks "why not NVIDIA?" The problem with NVIDIA is that they are far too Intel-like of a company (see: my dinner table discussion from my Core 2 review). The other important thing to consider is that if AMD and ATI merged, a very important market for NVIDIA chipsets would cease to exist forcing NVIDIA to turn to Intel for scraps off the table, which the link above explains would not be a healthy lifestyle choice for NVIDIA ... Simply merging the two companies wouldn't announce the death of NVIDIA or anything like that, because both would have to work extremely hard to actually overcome their weaknesses and make some of these fantasies happen. But if they could, well, that would reason enough to merge.  

M. Murcek comments on TechNudge:

I'm using a dual Opteron board with an nVidia support chipset on it. If AMD and ATI tie up, what incentive will nVidia have to continue supporting AMD chips? I personally stay far away from ATI's video card offerings, and probably wouldn't be too inclined to use another AMD CPU based board if the only motherboard chipset option was ATI...

Quoth The Raven64:

A GPU is not much more than an n-way superscalar streaming vector processor. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD wants to create almost-general coprocessors with similar characteristics that connect to the same HT bus as the CPU; plug them directly into a CPU slot and perform all of the graphics operations there. Relegate the graphics hardware to, once more, being little more than a frame buffer. This would be popular in HPC circles, since it would be a general purpose streaming vector processor with an OpenGL / DirectX implementation running on it, rather than a graphics processor that you could shoehorn general purpose tasks onto. The next step would be to put the core the same die as the CPU cores. The CPU industry knows that they can keep doubling the number of transistors on a die every 18 months for 10-15 years ... they are going to run out of sensible things to do with those transistors. Is a 128-core x86 CPU really useful? Not to many people. There are still problems that could use that much processing power, but most of them benefit more from specialised silicon. Within the next decade, I think we will start to see a shift towards heterogeneous cores.

WoTG likes the idea:

What will AMD need to do to be more successful in 5 years than they are today? ... The stable, highest volume, and generally profitable sales are in corporate servers and workstations ... [OEMs] want cheap, fast, reliable supply, few defects, and ease of integrating into the individual computers. After several years of the Athlon and Opteron, AMD is only now starting to get a toe hold in workstations and a reasonable share of server CPUs. IMHO, AMD would be well advised to start shipping it's own chipsets, just like Intel. It just makes things easier for their most important customers, the big OEMs. They have one less vendor to worry about. There's less testing required, since presumably AMD would test the CPU and chipset together. And it's less risky for both customers and AMD since AMD has a very strong incentive to make sure that chipsets will be available for their platform on time, whereas third parties have different priorities ... Five years ago AMD needed partners and an ecosystem to support their own platform and survive as a company. The next five years are about turning the CPU market into a duopoly.

Buffer overflow:

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And finally... The Vader sessions
 

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.