Posted on 07/24/2006 10:49:07 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the chipmaker that has started supplying processors for Dell computers, has agreed to buy rival ATI Technologies. AMD wants to boost sales and close the gap between it and market leader Intel.
It will pay $5.4bn, $4.5bn (£3bn) in cash and make up the rest in equity. That values ATI shares at $20.47 each, 24% more than their close on Friday.
Despite concerns about the price of the deal, analysts said buying graphics chipmaker ATI did make sense for AMD.
"It's a brilliant strategic move," said Eric Ross, an analyst at ThinkEquity Partners.
"AMD essentially have cornered the high end graphics platform for themselves. Intel is getting squeezed out there."
In electronic trading before the open of the US stock market, AMD shares dropped 8% and ATI shares jumped 16%.
AMD said the deal would help it expand its products in the commercial, mobile computing and gaming sectors.
It also would help it expand its media and emerging market offerings.
ping
Their is also a rumor going around that Intel pulled ATI's bus license sometime in the past 7 days.
I read a very interesting article about this a couple weeks ago when it was all still just rumor. It laid out a great case why this was good for not only AMD and ATI, but Intel and nVidia also.
It will be interesting to see how this will all play out, but I for one at least am optomistic.
Sounds AOK.
Hardly. Ever heard of nVidia?
Does this give us any chance at all of having decent ATI video drivers in linux?
If this were the case, do you think that there would be an AMD/ATI/Microsoft vs. Intel/nVidia/Apple war ahead?
Apple and Intel have already teamed up, and AMD and Microsoft worked closely on the Athlon XP.
It seems like if this happened, then we'd be headed for fragmentation in the PC market and eventually incompatibility between hardware.
Sure, x86 compatibility would remain, but in the future it might end up being a "VHS vs. Beta" all over again.
If this were the case, do you think that there would be an AMD/ATI/Microsoft vs. Intel/nVidia/Apple war ahead?
There's going to be a lot more hesitation to share important information between companies that have divisions that must work with the competitors of other branches of their own company.
In my experience, such things don't prevent cooperation entirely, but they do have a significant effect.
What kind of clueless drivel is this? Apparently this guy hasn't heard of the little company that competes with ATI; nVidia.
I'm not sure what to make of this deal. nVidia makes the best-performing chipset for AMD motherboards, so one might expect this merger to sour that relationship somewhat. I'll have to wait and see, but AMD might have just shot itself in the foot.
Are the Catalyst drivers for Linux not decent?
They are (or at least were in 2002) the same
as the FireGL drivers.
Yeah, I hadn't even taken that info into account. I think they must be counting their Dell chickens before they hatch or something.
I hope this won't be AMD's doom. I've been a fan for a LONG time. (Used to build Novell Netware 3.x servers with AMD 486/DX2-66 CPU, 64MB RAM, 1GB HDD.)
Don't worry. From what I hear, there are some exciting things on the horizon for AMD. While this year will be kind of a regrouping, inch forward type year with incremental improvements like the recently released AM2 chipset which *finally* adds support for DDR2, 2007 should hold some more fireworks for the Intel/AMD battle.
They are awful. Currently, support for all R200 based cards (Radeon 8500-9250) is broken. The only solution to this problem is to use old drivers which are terribly buggy and unstable (or to use the drivers from DRI which have the same bug and sability problems).
It also took ATI nearly a year to start releasing drivers which would work with XOrg instead of XFree86.
It also irriates me that they can't even make their own version of glxgears (fglrx_gears) work properly. As far as I know, it is supposed to render glxgears to a texture and apply it to all six sides of a rotating cube. Unfortunately, using ATIs drivers, the cube is just a solid blue color. This seems to be an indication that pixel buffer support is broken.
Games generally work with some bugs here and there. However, what really irritates me the most is their general incompetence in their OpenGL implementation.
Being a developer, I expect correct code to behave correctly. It is especially difficult to deal with their lack of quality when it comes to learning something new about OpenGL and wondering where your code is wrong and why your results are bad when it is actually a driver bug.
Next time, I'm buying nVidia -- open source or not.
So what!?
The Dell chickens are a for sure thing for awhile, the problem with Intel's server chips is they lack scalability into the 4p, 8p segement were Opteron still dominates. Not to mention socket f is coming out for opteron and will be very interesting to see if moving from registered to non-registered ram makes a difference seeing as Woodcrest isnt that much more powerful.
ALso lets not forget that as Super a Chip as Conroe is they dont have that many produced and wont for awhile and Intel is still bogged down with billions of dollars worth of pentium 4's and D's, thats why its a good move now for AMD to make such a move among many.
self ping
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