The More
Things
Change...
Contents
Ed Word
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B
y now, you all know that AMD has purchased
ATI for a whopping $5 billion and change. The
rumor had been fl oating around the Internet for several
months prior to the offi cial notice, but it’s the biggest
technology deal so far this decade, and it will have a
more profound impact on us—the PC geeks—than the
HP/Compaq merger or the Apple/Intel marriage.
It’s a huge deal, but I don’t expect to see a massive
shakeup in the short term. AMD will continue selling
CPUs, but will add videocards and motherboard
chipsets as well. It’s likely that the Radeons at Best
Buy will sport AMD logos come the end of this year.
And AMD is committed to supporting ATI’s customers.
The long-term ramifi cations are much more
interesting, but worrisome. AMD’s offi cial reason for
buying ATI is to kick-start its chipset division—long a
weakness of AMD. It plans to continue offering discrete
graphics, but 3D wasn’t a primary concern.
My worst fear is that AMD will cede the high-end
3D hardware market to nVidia, eschewing expensive-
to-develop premium 3D hardware for cheap-‘n’-easy
low-end parts. After all, R&D for a high-end GPU like
the Radeon X1900XTX is mind-numbingly expensive. It
could be tempting for the bean counters in Sunnyvale
to cut loose the high-end 3D R&D the fi rst time the
wind shifts in an unfavorable way. The batt;e between
ATI and nVidia is one of the reasons graphics haveprogressed so far in the last fi ve years.
Could my nightmare scenario happen? Maybe,
but it’s pretty unlikely. If AMD cedes the high-end 3D
market, it would also be leaving the lucrative high-end
gaming market—on the CPU, chipset, and graphics
fronts. It would be foolish to throw away the last two
years of good will captured by the Athlon 64 processor,
not to mention the dump trucks full of money that
gamers spend every year on hardware.
Of course, I’ve heard a ton of conspiracy theories
about the buyout as well—ranging from realistic (AMD
purchased ATI to break into the cellphone market)
to the insane (ATI only approved the sale because it
feared the Xbox curse that affl icts every vendor who
builds hardware for Microsoft consoles).
Maximum PC’s own Gordon Mah Ung posited
a slightly more plausible theory this afternoon: What
if AMD uses its new graphics prowess to fork PC
architecture? Could AMD build a custom motherboard
and graphics solution—a la Xbox 360—that leverages
a custom chipset with high-speed interconnects
between the CPU, a proprietary GPU, and the system
memory to outperform Intel and nVidia, while retaining
Windows-compatibility? Only time will tell.Features
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