Thursday, February 14th 2008
Analyst Believes NVIDIA May Acquire AMD Despite Possible Loss of x86 Licensing
American Technology Research analyst Doug Friedman believes NVIDIA could acquire Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) despite AMD's x86 license from Intel being non-transferable. Friedman believes that AMD and Intel's long term roadmaps are a threat to NVIDIA and cites mounting pressure from AMD's stock holders as a reason for its vulnerability to a buyout from NVIDIA. AMD's recent troubles with its quad core processors and ATI's recent weakness in the high end graphics market have only exacerbated this pressure. Friedman sees AMD and Intel's plans for integration of CPUs and GPUs as a threat to NVIDIA and believes NVIDIA anticipates this future competition as well. Combining this information with rumors that Intel is attempting to develop discrete graphics adapters of their own leaves NVIDIA in a possibly weakened position. However, AMD's extensive cross-licensing of x86 and other technologies with Intel would not be NVIDIA's only obstacle. They would also face possible anti-trust investigation from United States and European Union law enforcement agencies.
Source:
X-bit Labs
82 Comments on Analyst Believes NVIDIA May Acquire AMD Despite Possible Loss of x86 Licensing
but seriously, prices would skyrocket!! :banghead:
the cpu king let em keep the license to keep the monopoly situtation acceptable.. hmm..
trog
In any case I don't see this happening. There have always been tongues wagging about AMD, because they're either way up, or way down - but they will bounce back, given time, and Intel will slip again given time.
either way - a lot of people have been "talking" about AMD since the beginning of the year, both negative and positive. Their stock has been all over the board over the last 2 months, also -
the way it appears to me, really, is that AMD is getting their foundation straight. They're stabalizing themselves and getting rid of old debt. Once they're on their feet, they should be back on the rise.
Otherwise, there are too many independant companies that woudln't agree to such a merger, and would probably be willing to loan AMD the money to keep themselves in operation if need be - and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a middle eastern company of some sorts, as AMD has partnered heavily with other businesses from that region of the world before.
that is worse than nvidia buying AMD
Nvidia would have a hard time buying AMD becuase of ATI
IF AMD split off ATI and sold it to Intel, and then was bought by Nvidia, that would work.
That would also be excellent. Intel would pour money into the ATI products (as they assimilated them into the Intel line) and GPUs could move forward at an increased rate because of Intels resources (45nm GPUs?).
I pretty sure Intel/ATI would win that one handily. Intel has deep pockets.
also apple would suck if they bought amd out, but if they bought into amd it may be good, because it wouldnt raise prices, it would give amd a larger market image, i mean imagin all those mac commercials having an amd logo in them!!!
i hate mac, but it would be GOOD for amd's sales in the pc maket, and if anything it would probbly raise the quility of the mac's since they would probbly get better videocards in them as well!!! (no more x1300 in a high end mac!!!!)
i dont see this going off no matter what tho, nvidia would be screwed if they tryed to buy amd, it wouldnt get past the monopoly laws, nvidia is the only other real chipset maker, amd is the only real compotition for intel in the pc market, yeah via has chips but they arent even in the same market as the LE semperons at the moment let alone the same market as a c2 celeron......
i never trust these things, in the past i have seen stuff like this that said intel was going to buy cyrex or amd, never happened.
humm, to bad amd dosnt got some extra capitial, they could buy via :P
IBM SHOULD BUY AMD!!
IBM is the only company with the capital to rescue AMD at the moment I believe. Plus, they came up with X86 before Intel. It'd really stink if some Asian/ oriental company bought AMD. They would try to cut corners and really sink AMD's reputation, etc. I'm not sure where ATI would be after something like that happens.
as to sales weakness, its not just that its "mind share" people talk, and they see benches with the intel chips stomping the amd chips, even tho this dosnt mean shit for the normal user, any chip he gets today will have more power then he will ever make use of, its still perception.
this is like when i took echonolics and we had a long talk about why resessions happen, and what it comes down to is PERCEPTION, people see it on the news and in papers that we are headed into a ression and talk about it with others then prety soon they stop spending, and because most of the world is a consumer based ecoimy, this means that without people spending their $ and consuming stuff the ecoimy stalls out.
honestly, its more about psycology then anything, look how well the p4 chips sold all on the perception that intel=fast and mhz=fast, stupid people picked them up and where braggin they had a 2.6gz p4, and more times then not it really was more cpu then they needed since all the avg user does is download music and email and surf the net, but users who came into shops i worked at in those days where alwase shocked at how fast my little amd system was that only ran at 1.6gz and looked like hell(home built portable system, made from an old samsonite breifcase.....lol)
slowly many p4/intel users started to see that for their $ they got more from amd, and word of mouth spred, people started looking at reviews/benches and amd got a nice boost in market share from it, then intel FINNELY YEARS LATER got back on track with the core2 chips and dumped the p4/netburst designs.
now i still have people who REFUSE to upgrade their 3gz p4 chips because they just cant understand how a 2.x gz chip could be faster then a 3gz chip, and all the annalogy and explination in the world dosnt help them get it........(frustrating to be sure)
so even tho in reality the barc chips are still selling like hotcakes dispite the flaw(linux servers have an EASY fix for the problem that dosnt harm perf at all) people see the benches of the desktop chips being slitly slower then intels chips and assume they much suck then(dispite being ALOT cheaper for a quad)
again its all perception, really amd is picking up nicely now, and should endup doing just fine in the fairly neer future(im hoping the kuma and rana cores overclock well and are cheap :D
When AMD is marketing "Smarter choice", only smarter people can realize that. ;)
BTW Phenoms are not problematic, just some good bios and they rock. The problem (TLB) if exists is just in paper bcz we Phenom's users never saw it. lol