Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 2870749" data-attributes="member: 2810">The aftermarket sales of video cards are a drop in the bucket compared to the pre-installed and integrated market.  ATI and NVidia are for all intents and purposes in a dead heat, with no sign that things will tip either way anytime soon.  In the CPU and MB market, Intel dominates, with AMD so far behind it's not even funny.  (And actually, I seem to recall that the CPU and MB market for Intel is pretty small compared to their embedded market.)In the short term, this will eliminate the use of ATI chipsets in any Intel-based motherboard, which is a loss.  This will cut them out of the vast majority of the market, since most (but not all) of HPs offerings are Intel-based, and Dell is still Intel-only in the desktop.  This will likely also hurt both of them in the laptop market, which (a) is growing much faster than the desktop, and (b) is a part of the market where AMD doesn't have a credible offering already.  Making yourself less attractive in the growth part of the market doesn't make much sense.  AMD+Nvidia would have made more sense, since at least the nForce chipset is well-established and reasonably mature (although the networking in the series4 was buggy as hell). The real risk in the next year or so is in digesting the acquisition.  Its not uncommon for a company to stumble during this period, and right now, neither can afford a delay in their next generation technology.  Any synergies (and I'm skeptical, as there isn't a lot of overlap right now between GPU and CPU design) are going to be a long time coming.   ATI doesn't have their own fab plants, so AMD isn't addressing one of their other shortcomings, either.  AMD might see some long-term benefit in an all-in-one MB offering -- it might help them crack into Dell's, for example -- but there are two roadblocks there as well.  First, they still won't be able to manufacture their own stuff, so high-volume availability could still be a concern.  Secondly, they'll need to keep their price advantage over Intel, which doesn't give them a lot of wiggle-room in terms of feature-set.  You won't magically see x1800s in $400 PCs just because of this.</blockquote>

Verification