ATI keeping AMD’s sinking ship afloat
By Erna Mahyuni
As AMD flounders in its struggle to remain competitive against Intel, it should likely be grateful for its ATI purchase. Though there was much skepticism initially about the buyout, ATI is making significant gains against its rival NVIDIA.
In NVIDIA’s defense, the company has kept up with ATI’s constant product rollouts but has received a lot of bad press about its driver compatibility with Vista. On laptops, screens may cut out to a black screen, the graphic card equivalent of Microsoft’s infamous Blue Screen of Death. Despite constant updates to its drivers, until now, constant complaints about driver incompatibility have made NVIDIA rather unpopular among Windows Vista users. Of course, all that benefits rival ATI as the only dedicated graphic card maker left to compete. Intel’s integrated graphics have yet to gain much from NVIDIA’s weaknesses.
Financial Times blogs about ATI’s promise to create a better breed of graphic chip by combining it with a central processing unit (CPU). So far that endeavor has yet to materialize, with AMD losing a lot of money to the effort. AMD’s recent decision to spin off its manufacturing and returning to its core business of designing cores might be the smarter one in the long run. One reason AMD has been struggling lately is because of its constant missing of product deadlines, and after long waits, the results have been rather disappointing. Instead of a proper quad core processor to challenge Intel’s current multiple core offerings, it offered the dismal triple-core Phenom.
It leaves one to wonder, what would have happened if AMD hadn’t purchased ATI. Would its situation be better now, or would the company have sunk earlier without ATI’s success to tide it over? What is apparent is that AMD should either make true its claim that the “Future is Fusion” or cut its losses and scrap the idea altogether.
Related:
Entry was posted
on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 5:54 am
under
Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
Stumble It!
October 9th, 2008
“it should likely be grateful for its ATI purchase.”
I disagree. AMD blew 5 billion on that purchase, and right now they’re 5 billion in the hole. Their Fusion hasn’t worked out yet, so what has ATI contributed to AMD other than a massive debt that led to this spinoff?
November 10th, 2008
I agree with fwfsfgeaf, you your viewing point is flawed; ATI is responsible for so many of AMDs tremendous losses the last years, not to mention they paid a few billions more than ATI was worth resulting in a $1.6 billion USD net loss Q1 2007 (or was it Q2? I don’t remember). I think AMDs shares are worth less today than what ATIs were at the time of purchase. Soon when deneb is released, AMD will be able to compete against the core 2s and get some profits.
May 27th, 2009
AMD is much better performing than INtel on all points. Sorry mates. You have to agree with that!