AMD en ATI merger now official

AMD and ATI today officially announced that the merger between the companies has been approved and is now official. AMD purchased ATI in July this year for almost 5.5 billion dollars.

A lot of analysts and web sites have speculated what the exact effects on the two companies would be after the merger, however nothing was known up to now. Even now not a lot has been disclosed, but today one speculation was cofirmed; ATI and AMD are working on a processor with an integrated GPU. This way AMD/ATI claim to be able to offer the highest possible performance and efficiency at lower power consumptions (and a lower price). The chip that they are working on has received the codename Fusion, and will be ready at the end of 2008 or the beginning of 2009. AMD has proven in the past that integrating a memory controller on the processor improves performance as some of the bottlenecks in a system are taken out. The expectation is therefore that an integrated GPU will improve perfromance and efficiency, but it is by no means a simple project.

A GPU hidden inside a CPU, AMD/ATI claim to have one ready in about three years

The above is all in the future, but some effects of the merger can be seen today. If you go to the ATI website you will see that the sites have been merged as well as the companies. The new site, ati.amd.com, contains all the information that used to be on the ati.com website, but in an AMD fashion. It seems that they have been a bit careless transferring al the data, as the fastest gaming machine on the planet is mentioned on the frontpage, but it contains an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

The ATI site has goneAMD...

Tags: amd fusion core2

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