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Title: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: schild on July 24, 2006, 04:44:23 AM Yea yea, we were chatting about it in another thread. But here's the scoop from the Inquirier.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33223 Text: Quote AMD CONFIRMED its acquisition of ATI this morning, three days after the INQUIRER let the cat out of the bag. While we doubted the chip-maker could afford to buy out the Canadian graphics chip firm, it turns out CEO Hector Ruiz went cap in hand to his bankers and borrowed a cool $2.5 billion. Ruiz crowed the deal would "reinvent our industry," as he appeared in New York with ATI CEO Dave Orton. At 4.30AM? No wonder Dave Orton looks a bit tired. AMD agreed to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of ATI for a combination of $4.2 billion in cash and 57 million shares of AMD common stock, based on the number of shares of ATI common stock outstanding on July 21, 2006. The total comes to $5.4 billion. AMD said the deal was 'unanimously approved' by the board of directors of each company, but it is still subject to ATI shareholder approval. Crowed Hector: "Bringing these two great companies together will allow us to transcend what we have accomplished as individual businesses and reinvent our industry as the technology leader and partner of choice. We believe AMD and ATI will drive growth and innovation for the entire industry, enabling our partners to create differentiated solutions and empowering our customers to choose what is best for them." Dave Orton, President and CEO of ATI claimed all of the companies' product lines would benefit. "Joining with AMD will enable us to innovate aggressively on the PC platform, and continue to invest significantly in our consumer business to stay in front of our markets," he reckoned Orton will join AMD as an executive vice president of the ATI business division, reporting to the AMD office of the CEO, comprising Ruiz and president and chief operating officer Dirk Meyer. But hundreds of other employees will lose their jobs as the new giant seeks to cut operating expenses by around $75 million by the end of 2007. The combination of AMD's processor expertise with ATI's 'strengths' in graphics, chipsets and consumer electronics, would result in a "new and more formidable company," the pair claim. The combined company would have achieved approximately $7.3 billion in total consolidated sales during the last four quarters with a workforce of approximately 15,000 employees, according to the joint statement today. ATI will pay AMD a termination fee of $162 million should the deal yet founder. The transaction is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2006. µ Fascinating. So, will Dell stop carrying ATI products? I can't help but think AMD's purchase was influenced by the monster retailer and its bunny love for Intel. But this is all sort of foreign to me. I can't see how this will help ATI at all other than make it's shareholders very very rich. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: dusematic on July 24, 2006, 05:20:36 AM If anything it will speed up Dell's integration of AMD processors into it's product line.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Kenrick on July 24, 2006, 06:59:45 AM Thassa lodda moneys.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Engels on July 24, 2006, 09:12:37 AM I would hail this as a boon for the industry except for the talk of layoffs. I don't know how many of you have been through a 'corporate restructuring', but its not pretty. Most of the time its not done with any type of surgical precision. How many good programers from ATI will be lost? How many of them have already sent work-visa requests to Nvidia?
Lets assume on an optimistic note, that the layoffs are only going to be in redundant sectors, such as customer service or sales staff; it will take a lot of time before our fantasy of an AMD tech and an ATI tech standing shoulder to shoulder in the laboratory takes place. In the mean time, god knows what'll happen in order to please shareholders of AMD. Shareholder pressures might make AMD put a subpar cpu/gpu esplendido combo package on the shelves. Does anyone really believe that if AMD makes a honest woman out of ATI, Dell will finally let them come into the big consumer package house? Maybe in the distant future, when the merger is a fading memory and noone even remembers the name ATI. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Strazos on July 24, 2006, 10:11:35 AM Hardware Techies have a long memory....
We all still remember Voodoo, Savage, Diamond, TNT, etc, yes? Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Alkiera on July 24, 2006, 02:49:20 PM I would hail this as a boon for the industry except for the talk of layoffs. I don't know how many of you have been through a 'corporate restructuring', but its not pretty. Most of the time its not done with any type of surgical precision. How many good programers from ATI will be lost? How many of them have already sent work-visa requests to Nvidia? Lets assume on an optimistic note, that the layoffs are only going to be in redundant sectors, such as customer service or sales staff; it will take a lot of time before our fantasy of an AMD tech and an ATI tech standing shoulder to shoulder in the laboratory takes place. In the mean time, god knows what'll happen in order to please shareholders of AMD. Shareholder pressures might make AMD put a subpar cpu/gpu esplendido combo package on the shelves. Does anyone really believe that if AMD makes a honest woman out of ATI, Dell will finally let them come into the big consumer package house? Maybe in the distant future, when the merger is a fading memory and noone even remembers the name ATI. Dell doesn't have any issues with ATI... my Dell laptop has an onboard ATI card. Now, it might be the other way around; the hope being that perhaps ATI will help AMD 'settle down', or something... but Dell is already shipping, or getting ready to ship, AMD-powered servers. Who knows how long it'll take for them to get to the consumer side of Dell, tho. -- Alkiera Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: schild on July 24, 2006, 03:08:51 PM Hardware Techies have a long memory.... We all still remember Voodoo, Savage, Diamond, TNT, etc, yes? That doesn't make you a hardware techie. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Righ on July 24, 2006, 06:18:07 PM This is a hardware techie:
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d6/Davehaynie.jpg) Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Yegolev on July 24, 2006, 08:59:20 PM Mmmm... AMD mainboards will prefer ATi now. I prefer Nvidia. Suck. Instead of getting chocolate in the peanut butter, they shit in the jar.
New company name: NAMD Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Strazos on July 24, 2006, 09:01:12 PM Maybe they've gotten better, but I had bad experiences with Nvidia cards previously.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Yegolev on July 24, 2006, 09:07:48 PM There are two kinds of people: those who have had ATi bite their asses and those who have had Nvidia bite their asses. I falll into the first set. On the bright side, if I go ATi again, I can get some Omega drivers.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Engels on July 24, 2006, 10:00:33 PM What is the deal with Omega drivers? Supposedly better, but they made Titan Quest run like ass for my machine.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Rodent on July 24, 2006, 10:15:32 PM What is the deal with Omega drivers? Supposedly better, but they made Titan Quest run like ass for my machine. Didn't improve my TQ, although to be fair I could already run it with mostly everything on high at an acceptable framrate. As for ATI/AMD. Well that's what I'm using at the moment, but I can't help to feel that it's just the two underdogs fighting for survival... Still - - = + right? Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Koyasha on July 24, 2006, 10:32:32 PM To me, this is interesting news that is irrelevant at the moment, but may be good sometime in the future. At the moment Intel and Nvidia have come out on top of the world with their Core 2 Duo and 7950 GX2 respectively. By the time AMD catches up and makes a processor that can really compete with Intel again, maybe they'll be working very well with ATI and have kickass support for graphics as well.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Yegolev on July 25, 2006, 12:00:30 AM What is the deal with Omega drivers? Supposedly better, but they made Titan Quest run like ass for my machine. I am finding TQ is an exception to many rules. It runs worse on my rig than anything else I have, even Oblivion. Most of the time, though, Omega drivers are a tad better than stock. Not sure if we are still in the age where sometimes you want older drivers for certain games, but I keep a stockpile anyways. If they start integrating GPU and CPU functions, that would be interesting. Put it in a Shuttle case and I know someone that would buy it. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Soln on July 25, 2006, 03:58:03 AM Omega Drivers are "optimized" and I don't know what that means in this case, just that I've seen visible improvement in my games by running them over the years. That and they give you free tools to overclock your graphics CPU if you want and other stuff. So, yeah. I have no idea what's up with TQ, since even getting rid of anti aliasing I'm seeing it stutter and catch up sometimes.
back the story the hardware wonks I know, and some investor guy last night on some investment show (how's that for accuracy) all were asking the same thing -- why ATI? There are smaller and apparently as skillful (but not as large) graphics chips companies out there to buy up if AMD really wanted "expertise" as they claimed. So market share and the other stuff. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Ironwood on July 25, 2006, 04:56:20 AM You know, that's a lot of 'Crowing'.
Thesaurus. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: schild on July 25, 2006, 04:59:41 AM I stand by my opinion that this is a ploy to get "into" Dell. What I don't see is why ATI allowed themselves to GET BOUGHT by AMD. Intel, OK sure. But AMD? Either ATI is worth nowhere NEAR what AMD paid and went for the money grab, or something terrible was going down in the house of ATI.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Engels on July 25, 2006, 08:20:41 AM I don't get the ATI hate, really. For years they provided graphics cards that were more solidly built than Voodoo, 3dfx and Nvidia, but software was not built around them. That's always been their disadvantage. In recent years ATI cards' stability has suffered somewhat, probably due to the insane competition to get the latest and greatest out there up and working, but its still the only strong competition against Nvidia, simply due to their ability to penetrate the market. Other manufacturers may be making chips 'as good as' ATI (a suspicious claim), but they have no reputation, mass production abilities or pre-existing customer base and wouldn't do much for AMD.
If your ATI card failed at some point, chances are it was more to do with the card's assembler rather than the ATI chip itelf. If you buy an MSI card instead of an ATI-brand card, you have noone to blame but yourself if the cooling goes pear-shaped and you burn the chip up. If you want to blame ATI for that, go ahead, but you might get the same result if you purchased the Nvidia chip from MSI. ATI probably made a wise move, since AMD has become, for better or worse, a prefered platform for gamers, simply due to its economic advantages over Intel. AMD is now the pariah of gamers, since it didn't come out with its response to the Duo Core 2 chip within 1 week of Intel's release. Waa! Anyone who's been through this before knows that its a dance. Within 6 months AMD will provide a response, and 3 months later Intel will scramble and put out its new Quad Core omg WTF Core chip, and the cycle begins again. Treating Intel like its the belle of the ball for the next consumer cycle is short sighted in the exteme. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: dusematic on July 25, 2006, 08:51:52 AM I don't get the ATI hate, really. For years they provided graphics cards that were more solidly built than Voodoo, 3dfx and Nvidia, but software was not built around them. That's always been their disadvantage. In recent years ATI cards' stability has suffered somewhat, probably due to the insane competition to get the latest and greatest out there up and working, but its still the only strong competition against Nvidia, simply due to their ability to penetrate the market. Other manufacturers may be making chips 'as good as' ATI (a suspicious claim), but they have no reputation, mass production abilities or pre-existing customer base and wouldn't do much for AMD. If your ATI card failed at some point, chances are it was more to do with the card's assembler rather than the ATI chip itelf. If you buy an MSI card instead of an ATI-brand card, you have noone to blame but yourself if the cooling goes pear-shaped and you burn the chip up. If you want to blame ATI for that, go ahead, but you might get the same result if you purchased the Nvidia chip from MSI. ATI probably made a wise move, since AMD has become, for better or worse, a prefered platform for gamers, simply due to its economic advantages over Intel. AMD is now the pariah of gamers, since it didn't come out with its response to the Duo Core 2 chip within 1 week of Intel's release. Waa! Anyone who's been through this before knows that its a dance. Within 6 months AMD will provide a response, and 3 months later Intel will scramble and put out its new Quad Core omg WTF Core chip, and the cycle begins again. Treating Intel like its the belle of the ball for the next consumer cycle is short sighted in the exteme. Good post IMO. One thing though, I thought that since Dell had begun selling AMD servers, that it was only a matter of time before they began selling more AMD stuff. Maybe they were just posturing to stop AMD's cries of "Monopoly!"? Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Engels on July 25, 2006, 09:02:55 AM I doubt that anyone really knows the answer except for a few muckamucks in Dell. I can speculate that Dell is probably under intense pressure from Intel to not do this, but I think the answer is probably more complicated than that.
Dell sells intel platforms for a pre-established higher price than the average manufacturer sells an AMD platform. Dell can get away with this simply because it has a good reputation. If you thrown AMD in the mix, you get customers buying lower priced AMD/Dell machines instead of the higher priced Intel/Dell machines, and Dell basically loses right there. You can argue that they'd sell more machines that way, but there's probably a cap on home pc demand, and Dell would naturally prefer to sell the higher priced Intel/Dells rather than saturate the market with cheaper AMD/Dell machines. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: HaemishM on July 25, 2006, 10:09:13 AM Maybe AMD just wanted some dollars from the ATI chips being put in X-Box 360's and Wii's?
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: geldonyetich on July 25, 2006, 12:08:47 PM Suddenly, my ATI card is obsolete - as though ATI's shoddy driver updates lately haven't been indication enough of that. (Later ATI drivers cause poor performance in certain apps (http://swforums.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=352372&forum=80&sp=0) and they've decided to drop VideoSoap support after Catalyst 6.6). Shows me what happens when I try to support the underdogs in a hardware field. AMD will probably get even less use out of ATI tech as Nvidia did out of 3dfx. The rebirth of a graphics card monopoly.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Samwise on July 25, 2006, 12:42:54 PM I don't get the ATI hate, really. It probably stems from their drivers and/or hardware bearing a strong resemblance to rancid piles of pig feces. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Sky on July 25, 2006, 01:02:33 PM Except that my old 9800 pro is a fucking champ.
ATI's always been weak in the driver category, though. Also, GeForce MX. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Samwise on July 25, 2006, 01:08:04 PM In seriousness, my own personal hatred of ATI comes from my own experience developing and supporting an OpenGL-based application. EVERY complaint I've had to deal with about instability has been from someone with an ATI card. I don't know if it's because their drivers are shitty, or because the hardware was shitty, or what, but it seems that stuff that runs just dandy on an nVIDIA card will lock your system up if you have certain ATI cards. And it's not like I'm doing fancy supar sekrit nVIDIA-only calls; we're talking "glColor3f" here. Stuff that's supposed to work anywhere and that has been part of the OpenGL spec from day 1.
Fuck ATI. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Morfiend on July 25, 2006, 02:32:21 PM My first graphics card was a Voodoo2, and I have been a Nvidia fan ever since. Their cards work well, their drivers work great, and are updated very often, and the one time I had a problem with a card (recently) the maker RMA'd it and I got a brand new card. Yay for lifetime warranty. I will continue to buy Nvidia until I reasionably cant.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Prospero on July 25, 2006, 03:47:47 PM I tried Ati once and paid the price for it. Their hardware might be the bees knees, but every driver upgrade just brought me more pain. Maybe the AMD merger will kick them in the pants. Someone has to put some pressure on nVidia, and sure the hell won't be Matrox.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Sky on July 26, 2006, 07:13:51 AM My first graphics card was a first-gen graphics decelerator. Actually my first two card sucked and I had to swap them to play different games (I think it was an S3 card and a Diamond Edge, not sure, though...memory wiped intentionally). Things got better when I got a Diamond Monster, a Voodoo1. Thence on to a TNT, a Voodoo3, a GeForce 2, and now the 9800pro. Always the higher end offerings at the end of the card's lifecycle, they tend to have the best engineering and features. I've been very happy with the performance of every card but the first two. Brand really isn't all that important imo.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: HaemishM on July 26, 2006, 08:23:47 AM I'm not sure where the ATI hate is coming from. I've been using a 9600 for a while, and have had no problems with it. Nvidia's performance has been spotty (maybe because I've always had to get the budget card). The GF 2MX was a champ for me for years, the GF4 MX was a piece of monkey shit and the 6200 I eventually replaced with the current 9600 I have now.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Yegolev on July 26, 2006, 09:02:44 AM Right, so I just started to wonder what is going to happen to the Nforce chipset? Basically when running AMD you have (had?) two choices: roll the dice with VIA or rest easy with Nvidia. I gave up on VIA quite a while ago, basically as soon as there was an alternative, so maybe they have improved. Anyone running a late-model VIA mobo?
EDIT: I suddenly remembered that I might have read that ATi is making mobo chipsets? Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Engels on July 26, 2006, 09:08:45 AM I haven't seen any ATI chipsets on motherboards out there yet. VIA is ok, but doesn't do anything spectacular. I have an ASUS A8VN motherboard that sports a VIA chipset and it does ok. Nothing to ride home about, but its stable, which is all I really wanted. I got burned with NForce 3 back in the day, so I stayed away from fancy chipsets. My next board will probably have an Nvidia chipset, simply because its flooded the market that it would take some shopping around to find a top of the line motherboard without one.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: HaemishM on July 26, 2006, 09:40:36 AM I'm running a VIA motherboard for an AMD FX 2800+. I haven't really had any problems with this one. I had an identical system that shit the bed, but I've chalked that up to a different (and shitty) power supply frying the board.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Morfiend on July 26, 2006, 09:50:58 AM I'm not sure where the ATI hate is coming from. I've been using a 9600 for a while, and have had no problems with it. Nvidia's performance has been spotty (maybe because I've always had to get the budget card). The GF 2MX was a champ for me for years, the GF4 MX was a piece of monkey shit and the 6200 I eventually replaced with the current 9600 I have now. The Nvidia budget cards are absolute SHIT. They are horrible. But if you just go up a step or two above the low end models, you will see a drastic increase in proformance, and longjevity. Hell, the 4600Ti card I bought like 3-4 years ago still works great. I had to use it for 2 weeks while I was waiting for my newer card to get RMA'd, and it was very decent. I didnt even try to play GRAW though. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: rattran on July 26, 2006, 10:16:39 AM I'm running nforce 3 & 4 chipsets on my machines, but I recently put together a couple of socket 939 ATI RS480 chipset boards for other people. They're stable, decent performers. No odd issues in either windows or linux, which makes a nice change from VIA.
Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Yegolev on July 26, 2006, 01:33:55 PM I'm running nforce 3 & 4 chipsets on my machines, but I recently put together a couple of socket 939 ATI RS480 chipset boards for other people. They're stable, decent performers. No odd issues in either windows or linux, which makes a nice change from VIA. Awesome, this is what I was looking for. Taking the ATi-as-chipset-manufacturer route, the buyout might make sense somehow. Intel makes both CPU and chipset, and maybe AMD wants to do the same. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Phred on July 26, 2006, 02:05:53 PM AMD will probably get even less use out of ATI tech as Nvidia did out of 3dfx. I think Nvidia did quite well with the 3dfx tech they bought. Their antialiasing quality went up hugely, and they got sli. Who knows what other things they got that aren't so appearant. I had a 3dfx 5500 and loved it. When I upgraded to a geforce 4200 the antialiasing sucked donkey balls, especially as I still had the 5500 in my other computer mocking me with the quality of it's rendering. About 6 months later Nvidia added the 2xQ mode which supposedly came from their 3dfx tech and their antialiasing looked a hell of a lot better. Next card I upgraded to was a 9800 pro ati and I have to say, it looked even better than the 4200. If developers tested as rigorously with ATI as they do with Nvidia I dont think ATI would get the bad rap for driver quality. Now I'm back with another Nvidia 7600 gt and I'm quite happy with it. I'm glad ATI has been around to keep Nvidia honest, as it were. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Alkiera on July 26, 2006, 10:51:28 PM Really, I think the reason ATI has so many issues with games is related to the 'NVidia - The Way It's Meant To Be Played' logo on the front of most of them. If I'm a game dev, and one of the companies will give me hardware and hand-hold me thru the optimization for their hardware, in exchange for excusivity in that regard and a cheesy start-up video... hey, I win, right?
When was the last time you fired up a game and saw an ATI logo? For me, I think it was the copy of mechwarrior that shipped with my Rage Pro Turbo(with 8 megs of onboard ram!). I just don't think they're focusing on getting developers to build toward them, so devs build and test to nVidia, and are then befuddled when the performance tricks nVidia gave them just don't work on ATI cards. Shocking, really. With regards to developing OpenGL on ATI... I've done a good bit of GL stuff on several ATI-based machines, never had any issues. Well, okay, when I ported my code to Solaris for a school project, it ran a bit slower, but I think that's because the graphics card on some of the Solaris boxes sucked(software renderer 4tl) None of those boxes were really speed demons anyway, whereas my home machine was pretty decent for the time. -- Alkiera Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: HaemishM on July 27, 2006, 08:49:42 AM When was the last time you fired up a game and saw an ATI logo? The Movies (and its subsequent expansion). Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: geldonyetich on July 27, 2006, 01:40:40 PM As somebody who's been using ATI cards for the past 4 years or so, I can tell you that they're actually pretty decent. They run games relatively fast and effectively. So, as much as I may have dumped on ATI's driver support before, they seem to run 98% of the games just as well as an NVIDIA card -- sometimes better! So, for the most part, ATI hatred coming from NVIDIA card users strikes me as completely irrational.
Yet, it's that remaining 2% of games that causes trouble and causes me to occationally stab at ATI's driver support from hell's heart. Knights of the Old Republic! Why couldn't it have been a crappy game that ATI's later drivers run absolutely unplayably? Why?! I don't particularly like having to downgrade from Catalyst 6.6 to 4.4 if I ever decided I wanted to play that game. I will end on one more note that supports ATI: They have to try harder. Most of the game industry developed their games to support NVIDIA drivers. ATI more frequently had to develop the drivers specifically to support the games. While there is some general DirectX compatibility going on, it isn't enough to say that ATI didn't have an uphill battle compared to NVIDIA. Not sure what AMD is going to do with ATI's tech. I've read that NVIDIA took 3dfx's tech and got Anti-Aliasing and SLI out of it. Not really - NVIDIA cards were pulling anti-aliasing before the 3dfx acquisition and would likely have improved at the same rate without. We didn't see the SLI functionality until several years later and in a completely different implementation. (3DFX's SLI was a "Scan-Line Interleave" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scan-Line_Interleave) method. NVIDIA's SLI is a "Scalable Link Interface" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface) method.) It's not that AMD doesn't know 3D at all -- 3DNow! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dnow) anyone? However, like ATI's struggle versus NVIDIA, there's a certain matter of actually getting the developers to write code that uses the hardware properly. Title: Re: AMD confirms ATI Purchase Post by: Koyasha on July 28, 2006, 12:30:26 AM When was the last time you fired up a game and saw an ATI logo? Prey. |