I remember a time when you bought ATI instead of NVIDIA, much the same way you still buy AMD instead of Intel. As we all know, AMD bought ATI, further confirming the implicit relationship between the two that already existed anyway. Now, though, the relationship comes to an end, since AMD has confirmed the ATI brand will be phased out.
ATI’s history goes way back to 1985, when it was founded as Array Technologies Incorporated in Ontario, Canada. Over the years, the company has developed graphics chipset solutions for all manner of markets, including more obscure products like Imageon, a line of graphics chips for mobile devices like PDAs and phones. ATI also supplies the graphics processors for most of the console gaming market (Wii and Xbox 360, and previously the GameCube, which is a Wii without fancy controllers).
Well, AMD feels it’s time to end the ATI brand. Usually, these brand shake-ups come across as rather arbitrary, but not this time around – AMD is readying the launch of its Fusion processors, which combine regular processing cores with graphics chips on the same die. In light of this it would only be confusing to carry both brands at the same time.
As a result, brands like “ATI Radeon” and “ATI FirePro” will be renamed to exclude the ATI bit, and branding stickers and such will get a nice added AMD logo. In order to not get into the awkward situation where PCs with Intel processors and Radeon graphics processors carry AMD branding, the company will also supply OEMs with AMD-less “Radeon” marketing material.
So, this is the end of the line for the ATI name. The first ATI-less products will ship later this year.
Will be interesting to see how well such a chip performs compared to more standard fayre.
So the people who know about the merger don’t care, but those are hardly the people you have to reach with emotion targeted marketing anyway and while I always thought the Ati Brand had a somewhat cheap feel to it, I doubt that AMD will immediately become a trusted Graphics Hardware builder to the less informed people, especially if the first products to come out are low end embedded GPUs.
Thus I think this is overall a bad decision and while very temporary in effect I predict a sales drop for at least a few months for the rebranded GPU products.
I think AMD is attempting to shore up their own brand as a technology company, not just a CPU company.
It takes time and effort to manage a brand. Managing two discrete brands doubles that time and effort.
If the ATI brand is not in and of itself incredibly valuable, it is likely to be both cheaper in terms of management, and more valuable to the AMD brand, to fold it in.
I wouldn’t really worry about that. Most people don’t even know what a graphics card is, let alone care which company makes it. The only people who care are the gamers, and they probably known enough to know that AMD graphics cards are ATI graphics cards.
It was going to happen sooner or later. I had mixed feelings about it at first, but the more i think about it the more I can see why AMD did it and I think it was the right thing to do for them. I look forward to seeing their APU’s next year.
I knew this would happen – and it’s so sad. ATI was one of the rare Canadian tech success stories. Canadians could say things like, “You know, ATI is Canadian” and other Canadians would say, “Oh yeah? Wow.” (…before quickly dropping the subject and continuing eating their breakfast muffins in awkward silence)
Now, it doesn’t even exist in name. Canadians can’t even say to each other, “You know, ATI used to be Canadian.”
I wonder how long before RIM is bought out by Microsoft and called “Bob on the GO” or something.
Edited 2010-08-30 23:13 UTC
“Canadians could say things like, ‘You know, ATI is Canadian'”
No they couldn’t, they could say, “You know, ATI is Canadian, eh?” though
And now they can say, “you know AMD is part Canadian?”
You know, Jim Carrey is canadian!?!
I always thought “Neil and Bob on the GO!” was more catchy!
Disclosure: my cousin’s husband once worked as a mid-level division head at ATI, so I have a bias.
That said, I agree with you. Visiting Ottawa and Toronto more than a decade ago I saw the likes of Corel and Tim Hortons and how Canadians (like my naturalized uncle and aunt) would take pride in them. Then when AMD acquired ATI, I felt there goes one.
I have a bias too. I had a project at ATI and I got to see the manufacturing line. I was being shown around and the executive casually mentioned that the small cart beside me contained half a million dollars worth of chips. I asked if they could wheel it to my car, but they declined. Pity.
Let’s see:
– ATI was bought by AMD
– Nortel, bought Bay Networks, but doesn’t seem healhty
– Corel, bought Winzip, Paint Shop Pro, Quattro, WordPerfect and sold their Linux distribution to Xandros haven’t heared much from them since, they do still produce and office suite
what else ?
They should just rename company to DAAMIT
I always bought nvidia instead of ATI and Intel instead of AMD.
*cough* http://img405.imageshack.us/img405/6034/ultkzjdnn3jzjfjszedfsci.jpg *cough*
So far, every 10.x+ drivers release have NOT worked on any ATI Raedon cards released to this date.
Maybe ATI should fire their fake programmers and get real driver programmers to actually .. you know .. DO THEIR JOB.
Sorry, I jumped from Nvidia to ATI to test their cards … cannot do that unless there are working windows 7 drivers, so back I went.
I only own one AMD/ATI setup right now, and that’s my HP Touchsmart tablet.
It’s a very hit and miss with Linux drivers, though the Windows 7 64-bit on it does work without too many problems.
Plain and simple, their drivers have always sucked. They got a bit better once they started the Catalyst series, but compared to nVidia and Matrox, their drivers had always stunk. When Matrox gave up on the 3D performance wars, and that left us with either crappy or less crappy drivers… well what choice did we really have.
Sad, sad times when we get to the point where there really is no competition. AMD/ATI may make awesome hardware, but without drivers to make that hardware work, it’s like having a really hot girlfriend that won’t put out.
I bought ATI to compare brands. I can’t even do that because the drivers either crash after 5 minutes or freeze, forcing a reboot of the computer.
This makes it impossible to even use the cards. Sounds and smells like fraud. AMD would do good to get rid of ATI all together.
Sounds like bad hardware to me (PSU, motherboard, ati card).
All videocards have drivers and/or configurations for which they fail and look bad. Which OSes?
Not to worry. Once the open source drivers are complete to the point of usability for games this problem will go away. You can be pretty sure that open source drivers will be high quality.
Of course this won’t help Windows unless someone undertakes an enormous porting effort, But, then, maybe in the future this will be an incentive for gamers to use Linux. ATI^H^H^HAMD hardware with working, stable drivers.
Drivers alone isnt enough to move users over to Linux … you need usability too, something linux severely lacks.
Gamers will take stable drivers over pretty much anything else, trust me.
And this has been the common refrain for how long? Anyways, those who want to play games TODAY purchase nVidea. Those who want to stay on the bleeding edge, get intel or ati/amd video cards.
Edited 2010-09-01 03:17 UTC
It’s been the refrain for a long time because it’s true and still hasn’t happened. I’m not saying you should hold your breath, because it could well be another decade, but eventually we’ll get there and things won’t suck.
I find it funny that some Apple products will have both Intel & AMD chips in them.
there was a time when as good as every mainboard on the market with an intel chipset had an amd flash-chip next to it (for the bios)
man, was intel pissed off
I think this is great news. Hopefully they will be forced to respond more quickly to ATI card’s instability and oftime bad drivers now that the AMD brand will be directly impacted by bad publicity. So I see this as good.
I bought a radon 4570 15 months ago, one thing I could not complain about was the windows drivers. They simply worked although the control center was a little bit of a pain. But then it came to Linux .. oh well, a few days later I bought a slower but cheap NVidia card, which worked in both worlds. The card probably now works well as well in Linux, but why bother to switch back the cards?
Even so, the cards and chipsets are called something completely different from the brand, so it’s high time they reorganized the naming a bit. It’s not as if they’d ever taken a chip from a completely different family and substituted it out of expedience, in the history of videocards. nVidia once changed from pre-production datasheets; but for releases, let us have names that reflect chip tech utilization,development revisions, driver revision, efficiency and hardware bent.
Xxiccuradelite O.3.01.28.0nm.86 Finniform Haiku Thread350r319.4s are going to rock.
Radelintethrobbo 3.02.28.0nm.93 QuickHEPA Thread411r322.2s are faster but below the FireThread411r21.8s’ performance.
Maybe they can relate what to call them in concert and find out where to put low power spec?
Pfft…well, at any rate they can mess with the Radeon name a bit while they’re at it to get some diversity that does make sense in there.