AMD & ATi acquisition complete

[Evil-Dragon]

Today AMD has finally acquired ATi. There is speculation on the future of ATI as a brand since the ATI website now redirects to ati.amd.com. (http://ati.amd.com/) There was a report about 2 weeks ago on ATI personnel having their email addresses changed to amd.com. This prompted a lot of questions as to the future of the brand and now we know that the ATI branding will only carry on Radeon cards.

The financials of the ATI acquisition have been slightly adjusted from the original announcement. Instead of a cash transaction of $4.2 billion, AMD will now transfer "approximately" $4.3 billion; instead of 57 million AMD shares, the transaction will now involve a total of 58 million shares of AMD common stock, valued at about $1.18 billion. AMD said that the total acquisition cost remains at about $5.4 billion. To finance the cash portion, AMD has acquired a $2.5 billion loan from Morgan Stanley.

Official Press Release: http://www.amd.com/us-en/0,,3715_14197_14198,00.html?redir=goBG01

New CPU/GPU Plans: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/10/25/amd_announces_fusion_processor/

If anyone finds any further info, feel free to post in this thread.

[Evil-Dragon]

More info, apparently they're not going to kill the ATi brand as was suspected.

Taken from The Register:

So is ATI gone forever, as a brandname at least? Apparently not, AMD Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester revealed today. He also indicated the two companies' fusion (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/25/amd_fuses_with_ati/) may not necessarily mean it's curtains (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/08/22/ati_chipset_roadmap_aug_06/) for ATI's Intel-oriented chipsets.
Speaking in London today, Hester told Reg Hardware the ATI name will continue to be used in association with what are now AMD's discrete graphics products and its chipsets.

This makes eminent sense if only because its allows Nvidia and its new arch-rival to continue to describe each other as the 'red guys' and the 'green guys'. If AMD dropped ATI, all GPUs - well, the ones that matter - would be all green, and how would anyone tell them apart?
Separately, Hester indicated ATI would continue to be the brand for the Intel chipsets, suggesting that AMD at least wants to continue to offer such product. Whether Intel will let it do so, by withholding future bus licences, remains to be seen.

[Steve Lux]

It has been shown to be a poor business decision to remove established name branding from the market. AMD is buying a market and there is likely more to this business deal than is publically known. I expect two added advantages to come out of this, the first would be a more seamless integration between the CPU and the GPU, and the second (more speculative) could be the designed load shifting of math intensive process from the CPU to the GPU - much as we are starting to see with Folding@Home.

This is all speculation on my part, but I could see this happening.