AMD to Buy ATI...

[Ron P.]

Thought this might be of some interest here, since we deal alot with AMD and ATI.

Source: ZDNET News found at http://www.news.zdnet.com

Advanced Micro Devices plans to acquire graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion, a move intended to increase AMD's mobile-computing and consumer electronics capabilities, and help battle archrival Intel.

AMD will pay $4.2 billion in cash and issue 57 million shares of common stock to ATI shareholders. Through the acquisition, announced Monday, AMD is looking to expand its efforts in high-growth markets such as consumer digital media and mobile computing, and to bolster its position with large corporate customers.

You can read the complete article at the following link:
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6097 ... ag=nl.e589

Ron P.

[keenart]

That is almost, but not funny. Considering Microsoft tried to put ATI in its pocket many years ago, and the then Canadian Company fought-back and told MS to take a hike. Shortly thereafter many ATI cards did not work with the MS OS and ATI almost went out of business. MS went to Intel and asked them for the same deal and they told them to take a hike. Consequently the monolith put its support behind AMD and has been actively supporting them ever since. AMD is almost a subsidiary of MS, now MS will indirectly have the graphics Card Company it used to covet.

MS always gets what it wants! I wonder if Nvidia is next? Glad I still have my ATI card.

[Terry Stetler]

Another ramification of this merger is that AMD/ATI may be preparing an open GPGPU archetecture in order to prevent Intel from establishing a closed one that others would have to license.

GPGPU: General Purpose Grahpics Processing Unit

Basically, it's the running of software in the very fast/high memory bandwidth GPU programmable pixel shaders instead of the CPU and host memory. No, this doesn't have to slow down the GPU at all because pixel shader type elements could be placed on the CPU die (unused embedded graphics if a card is installed) or even made into custom silicon sans display hardware.

The key thing is how programmable pixel shaders work: they are massively parallel processing units, which is ideal for things like encoding, cryptography, image/video, 3D segmentation, raytracing etc. etc. A good example of this is ATI's AVIVO Transcoder, which can encode MPEG-1/2, DivX and H.264 at 3-5 times the speed of most single CPU's by doing the calculations in an X1000 series cards programmable pixel shaders.

This thread on MURC sums it up;

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=57845

This could bring on realtime hardware speeds without the realtime boards if video software uses GPGPU to do complex effect stacks.