“Rumor, innuendo, demands, and all of the other juicy elements that one expects from a sordid love triangle have been cropping up in the AMD-ATI-Intel story over the past few days. I’ve been following the twists in the tale primarily via the ever-vigilant TR, so I thought I’d put together an Ars rundown with my own information and analysis for those of you who haven’t been keeping track.”
I’m very glad to see Ubuntu having gained so damn much popularity in such a short time.
I used debian in the desktop for 8 years (unstable, then testing) but finally got tired of all the hassle of updating and having package combinations that suddendly break, or not having “less-free” packages available because of Debian philosophy. Ubuntu’s philosphy of fixed stable release cycles ,together with a very user friendly layout were instant love for me!
Yeah, I love *ubuntu as well; however, how does that relate to this article?!?!?
Oh crap, I replied the wrong article!
It mostly all seems to be speculation, very little as far as facts go.
Always good to hear the latest rumors, but would liked to have seen a little more set in stone info.
This ATI buyout probably blindsided Intel because AMD is barely keeping up with sales. Intel probably feels betrayed by ATI because they were buddy-buddy until very recently… intel even allowed them (versus Nvidia) first dibs at an integrated chipset. Intel probably thought AMD was courting Nvidia so they held them back… Oops! burned that bridge. Now Intel has to make nice real fast with Nvidia to stay in the game.
As far as the article, ATI isn’t secretly “planning” to stop chipset production, Intel is taking away their right to make P4 chipsets at the end of the year.. why put money into a dead product. As far as intel buying a 3D maker, they have limited choices.. They are still under anti-trust investigation, so they can’t make a big spend on Nvidia. The only other 3D makers available are owned by other chipset makers S3 is with via and the other with Sis. Intel got into this mess by trying to get ATI to buddy up while cutting the core of their business with integrated chips. It’s intel’s greediness that fuled the whole mess!
AMD + ATI could have some really neat stuff. After all, AMD has never had a good chipset busines of it’s own, and AMD invented Hypertransport for more than CPUs.. ATI could put the GPU directly on the HT bus to the processor.. and AMD has that cool on-die memory controller as well. As much as Nvidia has high-powered stuff, ATI does do better at following specs on an OEM level than Nvidia does. If AMD beefs up the driver department for ATI they could really do some good. Even after the merger it will be 2 years at least before any new developments see their way to hardware.
Actually AMD didn’t invent HyperTransport, that came out of the Dec/Alpha/Samsung mess, I think it was originally called LDT or Lightning Data Transport. AMD certainly came on stromg with it taking over the HT people since they had already taken the Alpha bus design.
I am sort of pissed though at the merger, I have an Intel DualCore with the ATI Rad xxx chipset on it so I expect to kiss any real support away.
sorry, couldn’t resist:)
[joke] so your support will get at ATI/linux support level basically? [/joke]
on the other hand, I really hope ATI/AMD will publish specs, which would mean quite opposite for ATI/linux support. This would mean having two large vendors (ATI, Intel) with publishing specs and one with wonderfull support (NVidia). But I doubt wonderfull support would be enough to get linux fans across nosource bridge.
But to be truthfull, so far Intel is the most open company to xorg, and if state doesn’t change (aka. Ati or NVidia opensourcing), my end of the year compswap will be based on Intel integrated where enough (although labeled with “CAUTION” at first). Having machine just work out of the box is good enough reason to give Intel another chance.
Edited 2006-08-23 11:21
@mabhatter
In http://news.cens.com/php/getnews.php?file=/news/2004/11/30/20041130…
AMD formed an alliance with ATI in 2004.
Edited 2006-08-23 22:40