Is the ATI brand dead?

Rob Updegrove 8 Aug, 2006 at 9:14am ET Article published in Tech

The Inquirer reports that AMD is killing the ATI branding on all upcoming products, replacing it with AMD branding – including those products that support Intel.

The death of the ATI brand will pretty much start immediately, so you can expect that the fall line-up of chipsets and graphic processors will bear AMD branding. It will be certainly interesting to see that actually the best chipset for Conroe, or Core 2 Duo is actually coming from – AMD.

I’m surprised that the article supposes that the Radeon brand is going away. I don’t see “AMD Radeon” as being any more of a stretch than Sempr0n…

Source: The Inquirer

Comments

8 Aug 2006 ~ 9:15am GHoosdum Then again, this Inq commentary directly refutes the above article. A bit of infighting among the Inq editors, I suppose?
8 Aug 2006 ~ 10:18am Garg

I just hope that AMD is careful not to squander what ATI has worked so hard to build. It'll be bad for us consumers if nVidia is the only big player in the graphics market.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 10:30am lemonlime I doubt that the ATI branding will be knocked off any time soon. I would estimate a minimum of 1-2 years before they attempt anything like that.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 11:12am airbornflght Yeh, I could see that, the best chipset for an intel core 2 is: AMD RD600...not sure how well intel would tolerate that.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 11:23am Garg

airbornflght wrote:

Yeh, I could see that, the best chipset for an intel core 2 is: AMD RD600...not sure how well intel would tolerate that.

Actually, you have a really good point. This could mean less chipset choices if AMD/ATI isn't granted licenses to Intel's tech, and nVidia is seen as competition to ATI for the AMD platform.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 11:29am airbornflght

Gargoyle wrote:

Actually, you have a really good point. This could mean less chipset choices if AMD/ATI isn't granted licenses to Intel's tech, and nVidia is seen as competition to ATI for the AMD platform.

I heard the intel already pulled the licensing from amd/ati for future chipsets, but not sure if that is true or not.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 11:55am PirateNinja does this mean when I get my wii it will be powered by amd?
8 Aug 2006 ~ 2:16pm Leonardo

I heard the intel already pulled the licensing from amd/ati for future chipsets, but not sure if that is true or not.

This wasn't really totally due to AMD buying out ATI. ATI's entry to the motherboard chipset arena was fairly recent. Intel had contracted with ATI as Intel could not keep up with demand for chipsets. It was assumed all along that once Intel increased it's chipset fabrication capacity, ATI would be cut loose.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 6:17pm airbornflght well, people say that the ati chipset is going to be better, so I think I would rather have an ati chipset than an intel one at this point.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 6:30pm madmat

airbornflght wrote:

well, people say that the ati chipset is going to be better, so I think I would rather have an ati chipset than an intel one at this point.

I'll have to see that to believe it. I've yet to see a 2nd party chipset for an Intel CPU that does as good as an Intel chipset let alone better. Intel has long been capable of producing very solid, fast chipsets for their product line. In fact I've often wished they'd make chipsets for AMD's so that I could get a solid chipset for them.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 7:58pm airbornflght aren't there reviews out that verify this?
8 Aug 2006 ~ 8:07pm Thrax Yes, there is.
8 Aug 2006 ~ 8:11pm airbornflght thought so;)
8 Aug 2006 ~ 8:24pm madmat According to this preview the performance is pretty much the same with the ATI winning a few and the 975X winning a few. Hardly anything I'd call "better" on either side honestly. It'll bear watching when the production boards roll out though.

Sadly guys wanting SLI support will have to go with either the nForce 5 for Conroe or the Intel chipset since nV has decided to write SLI support for the big blue chipsets in the near future.