Thursday, February 23rd 2012
AMD Talked to NVIDIA Before Acquiring ATI: Report
According to a Forbes report which cites former AMD employees, AMD approached NVIDIA for a merger, before going on to acquire its rival ATI. Well before 2006, AMD's CPU designers envisaged the basic concept of an APU, where with advancements in silicon fab processors, chip-designers could add other components to a processor, such as an integrated GPU that's reasonably powerful. AMD lacked an integrated graphics chipset of its own, back then. These were some of the prime-movers of AMD's hunt for a GPU company, which was then much healthier, as it then had a promising and competitive CPU lineup.
According to the Forbes report, AMD first approached NVIDIA with the idea of a merger. Back then, AMD and NVIDIA had extremely cordial relations, as NVIDIA had a large market-share in motherboard chipsets for AMD processors. Apparantly, NVIDIA's boss Jen-Hsun Huang insisted on going on to become the CEO of the proposed AMD-NVIDIA combine, an idea that didn't fly too well with AMD's Hector Ruiz. AMD then went on to acquire NVIDIA's cash-strapped rival ATI Technology, which went to make AMD's Graphics Products division before being restructured and fully amalgamated with the rest of AMD.
The report provides a fascinating insight into the paths AMD and NVIDIA each followed, how their paths crossed at one point, and how the two went on to follow two entirely different ones. Forbes notes AMD going on to work on ever more powerful GPUs, while NVIDIA works on highly-competitive mobile processors. NVIDIA declined to comment on that story.
Source:
Forbes
According to the Forbes report, AMD first approached NVIDIA with the idea of a merger. Back then, AMD and NVIDIA had extremely cordial relations, as NVIDIA had a large market-share in motherboard chipsets for AMD processors. Apparantly, NVIDIA's boss Jen-Hsun Huang insisted on going on to become the CEO of the proposed AMD-NVIDIA combine, an idea that didn't fly too well with AMD's Hector Ruiz. AMD then went on to acquire NVIDIA's cash-strapped rival ATI Technology, which went to make AMD's Graphics Products division before being restructured and fully amalgamated with the rest of AMD.
The report provides a fascinating insight into the paths AMD and NVIDIA each followed, how their paths crossed at one point, and how the two went on to follow two entirely different ones. Forbes notes AMD going on to work on ever more powerful GPUs, while NVIDIA works on highly-competitive mobile processors. NVIDIA declined to comment on that story.
58 Comments on AMD Talked to NVIDIA Before Acquiring ATI: Report
Aegia had a great idea with PhysX, Nvidia bought them and have now effectively screwed it up.
you can buy a gpu off them to do compute but try to use its compute with an amd gpu and its not officially allowed, boll4x and pointless, their is allways going tobe a way so why bother and its an ocassional(due to few physx games) lost sale:)
Also, with PhysX, when it was still allowed with an AMD GPU as the primary, I actually bought a decent midrange card specifically to run it. Ever since they disabled it through drivers, I haven't bought another Nvidia card for the sole purpose of running PhysX.
Not to mention, their advertising scheme is losing momentum since there's less and less games that have it. Another notch in their fail belt.
Classic!
Either way, doesn't change the fact that they are successful. It's not like if the merger happened they would only go after teh consumer market. Mergers include all their markets.
www.tomsguide.com/us/amd-nvidia-merger,review-1061-4.html
Ergo, ATi buy-out was a bad deal for AMD.