AMD Buys ATI: What to Expect After the Acquisition - Other Possibilities and Implications
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If that sounds a little far-fetched, as it does to some analysts, let's look more closely at something AMD itself has said it wants to do. According to Jon Hannibal Stokes at Ars Technica, AMD would "like to see a variety of coprocessors, each dedicated to accelerating a different type of application, that can be dropped into an open socket AM2 or more specialized CHT socket and function together with an Athlon or Opteron as a tightly coupled coprocessor." With ATI, AMD now has a graphics chip company that can help them make it happen.
What would such a system be like? Well, imagine a CPU and GPU that share a pool of DDR2. That's not the fastest memory for graphics, but the sheer size of the pool will make up some of that loss in speed. The fact that the GPU won't need its own dedicated memory should go a long way toward lowering the price for such a system, without taking a serious hit on performance. That will make not only gaming enthusiasts happy, but also universities and other research organizations that need to perform graphics-heavy simulations. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of THESE machines at work!
So what does this mean for Intel and nVidia? Let's look at nVidia first. Computers are still going to need GPUs for a while yet, so nVidia's not going to disappear. At the very least, one would expect Intel to come knocking, though any kind of deal there might be awkward at best and stormy at worst. Meanwhile, AMD isn't going to turn its back on a company that holds the majority of its chipset market. (It's certain that AMD can't be very happy right now if rumors of a "brain drain" from ATI to nVidia are true, however). nVidia might also benefit if the usual chaos surrounding a deal of this kind causes ATI to delay some of its products, given that it is already more than a quarter behind with two of them (the 80-nanometer RV560 and RV570).
That's short-term, of course. The long term outcome may be much less positive for nVidia, but that will depend on a lot of factors, such as how well AMD and ATI mesh, and the real-world performance of a computer that combines the CPU and GPU. This doesn't even take into account what nVidia might come up with in response (which is one reason why it's so hard to make long-term predictions).
What about Intel? To put it bluntly, this has to suck for the chip maker. Remember, the company makes more than CPUs; now one of its largest competitors in the CPU market will be competing with it in other areas as well. Not only that, but with ATI's chip portfolio, AMD will already be going into areas which Intel has been slow to enter, such as cell phone chips. If AMD can make it through the inevitable challenges over the next year that come with its purchase of ATI, Intel will be running a race that's a whole lot more even than it's ever been.
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