[Fury]

AMD press release.

Edit: AMD/ATI merger FAQ.

[aldo_14]

Interesting.  going after (partly) intels integrated gpu market?

[Colonol Dekker]

Now we're one step closer to an effective integrated all in one pc off-the-shelf, *eventually * Well once they buy soundblaster i mean

The motherboards of the next few years are gonna be V V V Nice.....

[vyper]

I don't like this. I forsee great troubles when using nVidia cards with AMD/ATI boards/chips.

[Kazan]

I don't like this. I forsee great troubles when using nVidia cards with AMD/ATI boards/chips.

AMD is not Intel, you forsee nothing.

especially since it's hardly possible to cause problems like that on a PCIe bus without specifically designing problems into the CPU and then it would be antitrust and nVidia could sue AMD

oh and someone posted this on /.

http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html
wheel of reincarnation: [1968] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.
 
 Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. [...]

[Colonol Dekker]

antitrust

I love that term, A board is a board, They will accept NVIDIA no probs (i hope).........

[Kazan]

they would be absolutely out of their freaking minds to do something to piss off nvidia - the CPU and GPU markets both NEED two codominant manufactuerers to drive innnovation - and it would be a huge profit loss to AMD to piss off nvidia

[aldo_14]

they would be absolutely out of their freaking minds to do something to piss off nvidia - the CPU and GPU markets both NEED two codominant manufactuerers to drive innnovation - and it would be a huge profit loss to AMD to piss off nvidia

They won't bend over backwards to make it easy, though...........  I think AMD / ATi have already pointed out that part of this is a tactic to split open the imarket, even at the expense of short term profit (i.e. relating to intel support / mobos).  It's probably too risky to try and use that against both nVidia and Intel of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had their eye on, um, 'optimizing' for ATi proprietary tech in a manner somewhat akin to MS' apparent sidelining of OGL with Vista.

[Kazan]

AMD isn't dumb enough to engage in anticompetative practices - hardware isn't software, it's really easy to prove anticompetative measures have been taken

[aldo_14]

AMD isn't dumb enough to engage in anticompetative practices - hardware isn't software, it's really easy to prove anticompetative measures have been taken

Surely what you mean is AMD isn't dumb enough to engage in anticompetative (sic) practices and get caught? 

[Kamikaze]

Since AMD is significantly more friendly towards OSS developers, hopefully this merge will result in AMD releasing ATI's GPU specs to the driver developers. Linux users have been suffering from ATI's horrible binary drivers for long enough.

[Nuke]

this will either be a very good thing, or a very bad thing. only time will tell.

[aldo_14]

this will either be a very good thing, or a very bad thing. only time will tell.

It could be a 'meh' thing.

[IPAndrews]

Capitalism.

[Chris Lambert]THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE![/Chris Lambert]

[Fury]

When AMD has paid their loan to buy ATI, AMD should get another loan to buy C-Media. If you didn't know it, C-Media produces the best audio chipsets after Creative. Would certainly make both integated and dedicated sound card market much more interesting.

Since AMD is significantly more friendly towards OSS developers, hopefully this merge will result in AMD releasing ATI's GPU specs to the driver developers. Linux users have been suffering from ATI's horrible binary drivers for long enough.

No kidding. I really hope that ATI linux drivers will rapidly improve.

[Kosh]

hopefully this merge will result in AMD releasing ATI's GPU specs to the driver developers

I'm sure both Linux and Windows users would appreciate that very much.

[Xelion]

I wonder if AMD will decide to keep the ATI name for products currently in ATI's portfolio in 6 months time. I'm looking forward towards what this merger might bring, hopefully a completely updated platform.

I've noticed mergers are quite common now as well .

[Fury]

See the FAQ, ATI's name will change to AMD.

[Nuke]

amd radeon just looses that ring to it doesnt it

[Kazan]

i bet you the radeon line will remain "ATI Radeon" but they'll start a new line post merger completion