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"this will either help AMD, or pull them over the edge into the abyss."

No , this will only help them be more competitive against Intel total solution. Chipset + CPU + Video.

"In terms of fit and feel you'd have to say nVidia suit AMD better"

Wrong , Nvidia does not have the range of product ATI as. ATI as alwys been underated but there portfolio is more diversified then Nvidia.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/products.html

http://www.ati.com/products/index.html

"so there would be work to be done with ATI."

Nope , AMD and ATI where working on integrating some thechnology already. Thats wher ethis merger Idea come from.

" doubt whether nVidia's relationship with AMD would change much."

They are going to be competitor in some segments.

"The vast majority of takeovers and mergers end in either catastrophic failure or with not so much as whimper as to what's happened,"

Thats a lie based on no real accurate information , take all the current leader and you will see they have made takeovers and mergers to get where they are and the rest of the market does it a lot at a smaller level.

"and it can take years for the parent company to recover."

Thats another lie , good manager , who know what they are doing can turn around a company in debt to profitability. Most problems come from mixing manager who dont know what they are doing or affecting sales people in development function or the opposite and loosing the good one you had because you cut some dual post and play politics.

"AMD need to tread cautiously."

The current #1 CPU buy the current #1 GPU maker and other graphic chipset maker.

Console war this turn is ATI victory.

* Xbox 360
* Wii

Notebook war ATI wins

Low end , mid end , high end.

Very few Notebook ship with Nvidia GPU or chipset ( Intel is actually winning on chipset )

Desktop sales are in decline , most Brand name board ship with ATI GPU and chipset when ther enot Intel's.

Apple Macbook ship Intel 950 and ATI Mobility Radeon X1600.

iMac ATI Radeon X1600 graphics

Nvidia as better products in some category , but they dont ship or get selectionned by brand name and OEM makers.

ATI as always been superior in hardware but where plagued by drivers , now they are acceptable and mostly superior this days.

Just curious but are you a big fan of ATI? I mean it is a great company and all but do you have facts to back up what you claim about ATI having sales all around as you seem to indicate? Dells are almost exclusively Nvidia. Only their 20 inch portable has an ati and that too a measly ati x1800 which seems to be thrown in as an afterthought so as not to eat into their xps machine sales. Then Nvidia has nforce 5 based mobos and also Tyan is almost exclusively Nvidia isnt it? I dont see ATI having that kind of a platform like the nforce from ATI. And in terms of sales and performance, from what I see Nvidia beat ATI the last 2 rounds with products that run cooler and faster. Granted ATI still has the lead on IQ but that still isnt enough. Also in the notebook war how did ATI win?!

"Just curious but are you a big fan of ATI?"

I am a big fan of truth and accuracy.

"do you have facts to back up what you claim about ATI having sales all around"

Yes , look up ATI stock report and there list of partners. Nvidia used to be the only chip for most of ATI current partners , but somehow failed to deliver for some older products , hence the switch to ATI :

https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=...

"Dells are almost exclusively Nvidia."

No , Dell is almost all Intel on low ends and Ati on mid and high end , exept on a few models.

http://www.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/desktops?c=us&...

http://www.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/notebooks?c=us&am...

It used to be all Nvidia , but not nowadays.

"Only their 20 inch portable has an ati and that too a measly ati x1800 which seems to be thrown in as an afterthought so as not to eat into their xps machine sales. "

No , but then again , you dont know what your talking about , there is three reasons that can explain why ATI is there :

1) Nvidia was not interested or dont have a product ready for it.
2) ATI total solution was better and working ( Feature , energy saving , drivers. )
3) ATI offered a price and offer Dell could not pass up and Nvidia could or where not interested in matching.

"measly ati x1800"

http://www.ati.com/products/mobilityradeonx1800/specs.html

I will take what you cluelesly call measly any day over
Intel low end or ATI IGP.

"Then Nvidia has nforce 5"

Wich as fallen behind compared to where nforce 2 - 3 -4 where.

"Tyan is almost exclusively Nvidia isnt it?"

I dont follow Tyan , but based on your previous false comment I would have to say no.

http://www.tyan.com/support/html/drivers_support.html

look at Embedded VGA

"I dont see ATI having that kind of a platform like the nforce from ATI."

http://www.ati.com/products/integrated.html

They ship in most brand name computers when its not Intel ...

"And in terms of sales and performance, from what I see Nvidia beat ATI the last 2 rounds with products that run cooler and faster."

cheaper , faster , better , more energy saving.

I dont recall the cowdunk bulshit false information from the suryad FUD and lies consultancy to be of any value to me , or anyone living in 2006 and in the real world , sorry , its not personnal , its all about truth and accuracy.

" Granted ATI still has the lead on IQ but that still isnt enough. "

ATI is like GNU/Linux and Open Source , it dominate in everything exept a few market where its second or third , but ( insert bad adjective here ) people like you concentrate on very specific details out of there control. Driver , hardware and Intelectual property and innovation dont grow by itself over time or on tree even do you believe otherwise.

"Also in the notebook war how did ATI win?!"

Try finding actual notebook that ship with NVIDIA GPU and chipset.

I am impressed by the fact you know two company ( Dell , Tyan ) that make hardware , no , wait I was joking here.

Do some real fact finding and cheking , for a change , marketing and publicty and your friends are always wrong or border line lies and not accurate source.

Hehe looks like you took it personally. All I know is when one starts attacking other people personally, they are not worth a retort. Go look up any benchmark or review and you will see that in terms of power draw, Nvidia is most efficient. Alienwares ship with Nvidia and ATI but according to you you said "Try finding actual notebook that ship with NVIDIA GPU and chipset."

http://www.alienware.com/product_pages/notebook_all_default.aspx
More on desktops and SLI and Nforce platform:
http://www.alienware.com/product_pages/desktop_all_default.aspx

Anyway Dells sell Nvidia here:
http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xps_m1710?...

Isnt the XPS one of their bestsellers?

http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=11345
Scroll down to the power consumption section.

In terms of workstation mobos:
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/opteron.html
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/xeon.html
No ATI yet...

I am not saying ATI is bad or anything. It just seems they are a bit behind Nvidia. Also if you go read forums and so on the general consensu is that while ATI is very impressive, most people when building computers as a general choice are going for the nforce mobo and the sli or single nvidia combination. ATI mobos are great but the southbridge issue left a bad taste in people's mouth I guess. I am building a new computer...or buying one...and I am getting it from VoodooPC and it is going to be an all ATI system. I like ATI and I like ATI Crossfire. It still has a bit of rough edges around it but that I can deal with.

All I can say is I didnt personally attack you and so you shouldnt be personally attacking me. But whatever...I guess people like you are why wars and so on exist even in this day and age! Relax man and take a chill pill.

ATI as always been superior in hardware but where plagued by drivers , now they are acceptable and mostly superior this days.

Only superior if all you do is play Direct 3D games. NVIDIA's OpenGL stack continues to be miles ahead of ATI's.

This move definitely is related to Intel's Core Duo victory over anything AMD could offer.

Right..... And where do you get this idea from? I don't see how ATI is related.

The Core Duo has only just arrived, and it's really debatable whether it provides a real performance advantage over anything AMD currently has, already out in the world today, in the way Intel are suggesting. This is particularly true when comparing server chips like the Opteron. Personally, I'd be waiting to see what happens with AMD's four core and when they get their current architectures over to 65 nm for a comparison.

Edited 2006-07-23 10:50

-----------and it's really debatable whether it provides a real performance advantage over anything AMD currently has--------------

Actually, there's little debate there. I've been an AMD person for the longest time and got alot of fun out of giving heck to Intel users over the K7 and K8 chips, but Intel truely has a winner here.

The benches are almost all in Intel's favor. They also have the advantage with power usage.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795

It's gonna come down to price. But if you want the absolute fastest on the block regardless of the price, it's intel. That hasn't been true for a really long time.

nvidia is way much more advanced than ATI in drivers programming obviously seen from their driver's stability and features over almost all kind of OSs.

I prefer ATI drivers under Windows, so you can't say that nvidia is "way much more advanced." They simply put a lot more effort into the alternative OSs.

I do think ATI has a lot to gain from this merger - I'm not certain exactly why AMD would want it, though.

--------nvidia is way much more advanced than ATI in drivers programming obviously seen from their driver's stability and features over almost all kind of OSs.--------------

The last time this rumor popped it's head up(And trust me, I'm *NOT* holding my breath) I had mentioned that I hope AMD will take the proper steps and open source some of the specs for older ATI chips.

I realize we won't see OSS drivers for that whiz bang new R700 family of chips, but it's time that something more than R200 was OSS'ed.(I'd love to get my hands on an R300)

AMD seems to be alot more friendly with the open source crowd than ATI have been.

Just a thought..................

This move definitely is related to Intel's Core Duo victory over anything AMD could offer.

And your logic behind this is?

Very simple. ATI is providing the chipset for the XBOX360 and other OEM deals. This would be a in for the next console, to use AMD based processors.

I'm not sure how relevant this is.

The XBox had Nvidia graphics in it, and was swapped for ATI.

There is no reason to believe that this swap would not happen in the future.

Though, having a CPU and graphics chip from the same company could be very tempting.

Don't forget the other big group of AMD supporters.

-Linux Users

And big server companies....Sun loves the Opteron and so do IBM and HP. AMD been mmaking them a lot of money lately.

IBM does not control Lenovo. The cell is not a PC processor. No large consumer market (i.e. Lenovo customers) cares about doing physics calculations or graphics on linux. What else? None of these chip manufacturers or graphics cards manufacturers see Linux as a worthwhile investment in the desktop space. They think it's valuable in servers, but the market just isn't large enough to devote serious efforts to. And the graphics market requires advanced chips which pretty much rules out small players and leaves us in the oligopoly we have now.

One plus of this merger: ATI has access to more advanced fabbing technology than it did before.

Seeing as AMD make the only serious modern embedded x86 chip, the Geode, maybe they could make a system-on-a-chip with an ATI GPU?

ATi already makes such a thing - the Xilleon
it's based on the Mips ISA, but this fact is of minor relevance, as in the embedded sector resident software is most often custom compiled and built

Edited 2006-07-23 13:39

... I think the next logical step is two CPU cores and 1 graphics core, IMO. I don't think you'd be able to fit enough video RAM on a single chip, though ... heheh ...

True, 2 CPUs and 1 GPU would probably be the next step. Maybe even have one CPU, one GPU, and one hybrid.

The GPU of video cards (at least the ones I've seen) don't have RAM on-die either so I don't see that as being a hindrance.

Ram definately wouldn't be a problem for a CPU/GPU hybrid chip from AMD since their CPUs already have an onboard memory controller. I can see there being either shared memory, or motherboards with 3 ram sockets on them. Two system (dual channel) and one for the GPU.

look at the future HT 3.0 spec sometime and you will see how AMD's coherent hypertransport will support domain-specific processors, such as GPUs.

to run full blown Aero, i gather it will take alot more juice that the current say Intel 915 chip has to offer, but I'd put good money on a ATI onboard chipset that could handle it with no problems

The 915 (GMA 900 series) is a very old solution (available to the mass market two years ago, in fact). Yesterday's GMA 950s and today/tomorrow's [X]3000 chips provide more than enough power to run Aero Glass without a hitch.

LOL, 950 is same old 915 overclocked a bit
X3000 as being based on PowerVR core is (hopefully) much better

And if they opensourced the driver, and really went to work investing in improving it, pushed their production facility to the max, to provide atleast 85% of the performance of ATI/Nvidia top of the line hardware, at 1/10 of the price, Intel could use economies of scale to force Nvidia and Ati to open themselves up or get squashed by mass produced, good enough graphics chips.

AMD has some great software people working for them and have been very good about making specifications available. Hopefully these will carry over to ATI now that they're one.

I hoped that, but I work with ATI all day (I'm a games tester) and believe me, I have heard better lies come out of a three-year old.

We explain to them that a particular game feature (can't name because of obvious reasons...) was not working because of their drivers. Here is a "snapshot" of the conversation:

- Us: This game feature does not work because of your drivers.
- ATI: How do you know it's our drivers?
- Us: The feature works with nVidia... current AND legacy.
- ATI: Then it's your code!
- Us: No, because we digged in the debug code and "explained ourselves"
- ATI: You're lying, anything to make nVidia sound better! (this was the guys actual comment...)

A month later, the game is released and ATI released a patch in their drivers to fix their flaw. Nice to know how "professional" they are.

"- ATI: You're lying, anything to make nVidia sound better! (this was the guys actual comment...)"

Actually AMD is a hardware maker, *NOT* a software designer. From a HW point of view, AMD products, as ATI products are just impressive. To the coders (the people you makes the SW) to make their part of the work. If these people are not good enough, release crappy code, then fire them, and switch for decent coders...

As the guy who gave the silly reply just above. This one should be trashed first in example ! It's not the first time ATI prooved they own bad SW guys, but this one is worse, he cannot even recognize things are to be improved on his side.

Kochise

Edited 2006-07-24 12:31

"...means that AMD is not realising just how unprofessional AMD is"



huh?

Thanks for modding me down (I assume you did?)

Look at my previous reply for why I used the word "unprofessional"; although I could've explained it before, I did use the word "personally" for a reason...

I think he was more confused with the "...means that AMD is not realising just how unprofessional AMD is" comment. Surely you meant "...means that AMD is not realising just how unprofessional ATI is" ??