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As some of you many know, AMD has moved to buy up ATI Tech­nolo­gies for 5.4 billion. I think this is a very inter­est­ing move and places AMD to some extent on equal footing. Linus explains why par­tic­u­larly well:

[…] And while it’s a big risk, and the history of tech merges is full of horrid fail­ures, they’re not all that way, and I think there is more common ground in this one than in most others.

In par­tic­u­lar, I think both NVidia and ATI were looking at a pretty grim future, with Intel graph­ics being largely “good enough”, and the gamer market that they were the only two games in town for looking like it might be shrink­ing.

Even with Intel being way, way behind in graph­ics per­for­mance, it still holds a rather big chunk of that market. And “good enough” is a big part of it, and I don’t see that chang­ing. If any­thing, it’s prob­a­bly just going to get even more so.

And AMD during the last few years has been fairly strong in core CPU com­pe­ten­cies, but lost out to Intel in a big way on the chipset side. Intel basi­cally owns the laptop space thanks to Cen­trino, and I suspect that their inte­grated chipsets (graph­ics and all) are a pretty big deal for most of the busi­ness PC’s too.

And it’s not all just defen­sive either: both ATI and AMD get real poten­tial advan­tages out of it (ATI gets access to fabs, AMD may find itself with a HT graph­ics con­nec­tion, for example), so it doesn’t look like a move of des­per­a­tion either.

So while I agree that it may well fail for all the usual reasons (and clash of cul­tures seems to be one of the most common ones), I think it prob­a­bly has better chances than most acqui­si­tions.

Now, whether “better than most” is still “pretty bad odds” is of course quite ques­tion­able. But if you wanted to get a bit of excite­ment on the market, I think AMD and ATI just made hings a bit more inter­est­ing, at least

I had a quick ook at the press releases by AMD and & ATI: A Processing Powerhouse">ATI. I came across what ATI had to say what ser­vices and prod­ucts will improve through this move… and what was the one that struck out at me?

Mobile Com­put­ing
As a com­bined company, AMD and ATI will advance mobile com­put­ing by deliv­er­ing inte­grated plat­forms that are designed to extend battery life while opti­miz­ing graph­ics and media pro­cess­ing.

Maybe we might have an alter­na­tive to the stan­dard and cheap Intel onboard chips…?

For some­thing more inde­pen­dant, the New York Times article is here.