money.cnn.com — Advanced Micro Devices, the No. 2 supplier of computer processors, is close to a deal to buy graphics chip maker ATI for $5.5 billion and unless talks break down, a deal could be announced as early as Monday, a source familiar with the situation said on Friday.
Jul 22, 2006 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountJul 22, 2006
This is very upsetting to me.Being Canadian, shopping/buying Canadian is already difficult. Every store/product around is American. Very few Canadian stores exist in Canada believe it or not. ATI was one. Any Canadian store which becomes sucessful gets bought out:(:
busyanujJul 22, 2006
ya, only time will tell whether AMD's acquisition of ATi is good or bad.right now, all that one can say is that it's a major deal.
godsfilthJul 22, 2006
who knows maybe they will switch to AMD chips
rfunchesJul 22, 2006
"Would be very interesting to see AMD's and ATI's stocks for the last month or so after each "rumor" has popped up on digg and elsewhere on the net..."ATYT has been trading up since the beginning of July, AMD has been on a steady decline since announcing on May 19 that it would provide Opteron processors in Dell servers. AMD had a small bounce prior to its earnings announcement (as well as increased volume) but hit a new 52-week low on Friday's close with poor earnings news. ATYT traded up significantly on heavy volume at the end of May when a note from an RBC Capital suggested an AMD-ATYT "tie-up," and made a temporary spike downward on disappointing earnings guidance. Friday's close on ATYT brought it back to the level it was at when rumors first broke on 5/31, close to its 52-week high.
evilkatJul 22, 2006
Well I think AMD probably cannot afford to buy Nvidia and have any significant money left over to do R&D. But that's the besides the point. If you consider AMD's new 4x4 architecture which is due to come out soon, then the possibilities suddenly become very interesting. They could, for instance, drop an ATI GPU core into the second CPU slot and you'd have a pretty neat graphics system on your hands to go with your CPU. You'd have shared memory with the CPU and graphics card, and I'd seriously doubt you'll have bandwidth issues over their new hyper-transport (which has a ridiculous bandwidth number attached...I can't recall it at the moment). So time to get 1.5-2 GB of ram. Hell we've got 64Bit machines out there now. Let's make it 4GB >3
millixawJul 22, 2006
Apple won't switch to AMD. The whole point of the switch to Intel was for their laptop technology (Yonah and Merom), of which AMD cannot compete with.
desolataxJul 22, 2006
Oh No! AMD CPU's with Integrate ATI Graphics!
tetfsuJul 23, 2006
I agree... This move could really give AMD a lock on the gamer market if it's true. If they are able to engineer both the GPU and the CPU in such a way that will allow them to more efficiently and effectively communicate, they could increase the performance of the graphics without bumping up the clock speeds. This could mean enhanced performance without the drawbacks of needing more power or generating more heat off of GPU. This could be especially beneficial for the single core processors where it's the processor that is becoming the bottle neck. I specifically say the single core processors because most games today don't take advantage of dual cores or dual processors and operate on a single thread. We'll just have to wait and see I guess... I'm betting that it's true.It makes sense that they would want to keep the gamer market in their corner especially with the faster Core Duo Intel chips that are right around the corner. If games start moving to using dual cores and procs... then the tides could turn, but for now, we have what we have.
lvsfinestJul 23, 2006
@teagmanWhy would Apple have to "abandon" Intel to offer AMD? No sense at all.