by Abinyah Walker
AMD's acquisitions of ATI in late October was a smart move by the Advanced Micro Device company. Although the few Canadian's, who knew ATI was a northern company, will be disappointed to see ownership go south, however techno gurus and enthusiasts alike will applaud the move.
It is natural for a CPU company to get into bed with a GPU company, the children they make will be beautiful! In this case, the 5.2 billion dollar move to acquire what some would call the best video card maker in the industry, has done nothing but enhance what some would argue is the fastest CPU maker in the industry. Two celebrities unite for a showdown with a struggling Intel.
AMD has been beefing up its offerings over the past decade to become a real imminent threat to Intel's CPU dominance, except it was AMD that executed a pre-emptive strike by acquiring a premiere graphics company. Now AMD can use Intel's old marketing tricks to lure over more market share and enthusiast appeal from Intel. This is obvious in AMD's latest "Watch How AMD Stacks Up Against Intel", but as experience has taught me "be suspicious". AMD's heavy reliance on Nvidia for its statistics may be interpreted as an ideological alliance between the two companies. And AMD's acquisition of ATI, may have been a covert operation to bump the only Nvidia threat off the market. This corporate maneuvering mimics Compaq's acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) for the Digital ALPHA processor 21264, the then untouchable leader in RISC CPU computing speed and power. The AMD chips take alot of technological know-how the ALPHA project (Socket A) and its memory to CPU interconnects.
