amd and ati likely to merge

As is being reported, the long-rumored merger between chip giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and GPU maker ATI appears likely to go ahead, with an announcement due as early as Monday. The price? AMD would pay $5.5b USD, an unsurprisingly enormous amount. As a fan of both companies, I’m very interested to see where such an agreement would take them; the benefits to both are unclear at this point. The merger would certainly end the current use of ATI-competitor Nvidia’s integrated graphics chipsets in AMD motherboards and could even prompt Nvidia to seek an ally with someone like Intel. Impact on the GPU wars is likely to be neglible, though, as AMD’s expertise is almost wholly unrelated to GPU design. Time will tell, of course, and I’ll be here to bring you updates as they happen.

–D. S. W.