More on AMD and ATi Merger

"We may lose business on Intel boards, but we will break the Intel monopoly." With these words, AMD’s CFO Bob Rivet announced the takeover of graphics chip maker, ATI, offering a future of joined-up shared processing, split between CPU and GPU.

Questions asked during the webcast today showed that this went clear over the heads of most business editors, who wanted to know where the immediate shareholder value arose, suggested that the $5.4bn prices paid for ATI was far too high, and wondered how AMD might get out of it if/when they realised it was a fatal mistake.

The Register

AMD confirmed that much of ATI’s operation will be brought in-house, but AMD will remain, "committed to ATI’s customers, employers and Canada," said Ruiz. He added that he didn’t expect lay-offs "in any significant numbers". Ruiz confessed that AMD had been mulling its best options for a partnership over the past two to three years and it is ATI’s expertise in the mobility space as well as its chipset business that makes the firm such a good fit with AMD.

the Inquirer - Merged AMD-ATI monster embarks on monopoly-busting

With AMD’s announcement of its $5.4B acquisition of ATi, it came as no surprise that this has brought a change in old partnerships between the companies. As we know, NVIDIA’s SLI has been one of the driving force for the AMD platform. Although NVIDIA has an Intel edition, it seems that NVIDIA has put too much eggs into a single AMD basket.

OCWorkbench - AMD divorced NVIDIA and married ATi

Specifically, it appears as though AMD and ATI are planning unified, scalable platforms using a mixture of AMD CPUs, ATI chipsets and ATI GPUs. This sort of multi-GPU, multi-CPU architecture is extremely reminiscent of AMD’s Torrenza technology announced this past June, which allows low-latency communications between chipset, CPU and main memory. The premise for Torrenza is to open the channel for embedded chipset development from 3rd party companies. AMD said the technology is an open architecture, allowing what it called "accelerators" to be plugged into the system to perform special duties, similar to the way we have a dedicated GPU for graphics.

Daily Tech - AMD and ATI Promise Unified Development by 2008

The transaction is subject to ATI shareholder approval, Canadian court supervision of a Plan of Arrangement, and other regulatory approvals… In the event that the transaction does not close, ATI has agreed to pay AMD a termination fee of US$162.0 million. The transaction is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2006. AMD anticipates that the acquisition will reduce operating expenses by approximately US$75 million for the combined company by the end of 2007.

DigiTimes - AMD and ATI confirm US$5.4 billion acquisition