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News >> Technology >>
AMD completes acquisition of ATI
By siliconindia
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Thursday, 26 October 2006, 19:30 IST
Bangalore: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced completion of its near $5.4 billion acquisition of ATI Technologies. This comes three months after the announcement of acquisition.
With the completion of the acquisition, AMD now has a full new range of intellectual property (IP) in microprocessors, graphics, chipsets, and consumer electronics to deliver open platforms and integrated solutions.
There is another announcement revealing AMD's plans to create a new class of x86 processors codenamed "Fusion" that integrate the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) at the silicon level with a broad set of design initiatives. Hence, the new chips from AMD would integrate its x86 with a graphics processor on a single piece of silicon.
The "Fusion" processors are intended to provide step-function increases in performance-per-watt relative to today's CPU-only architectures. Meanwhile, these platforms will continue to fully support high-end discrete graphics, physics accelerators, and other PCI Express-based solutions to meet the ever-increasing needs of end-users.
Announcing completion of the acquisition, Phil Hester, senior vice president and chief technology officer, AMD, said, "With the anticipated launch of Windows Vista, robust 3D graphics, digital media and device convergence are driving the need for greater performance, graphics capabilities, and battery life. In this increasingly diverse x86 computing environment, simply adding more CPU cores to a baseline architecture will not be enough. As x86 scales from palmtops to petaFLOPS, modular processor designs leveraging both CPU and GPU compute capabilities will be essential in meeting the requirements of computing in 2008 and beyond."
AMD expects to use "Fusion" processors in all of their priority segments; including laptops, desktops, workstations and servers, and consumer electronics. The company expects to come out with the same sometime by the end of 2008. AMD also plans on delivering a range of integrated platforms in 2007 to serve key markets such as commercial clients, mobile computing, and gaming and media computing. The belief is that PC users would benefit from such innovations that are aimed at extending battery life on Gen-Next AMD Turion 64 mobile technology based platforms.