AMD & ATI

For those who don't care about chips -- silicon, not potato -- skip this post.

For those who do, you've probably heard that AMD has agreed to purchase ATI for US$5.3 billion in a deal which has been rumored to be in the works for a few months now.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I've been advocating the need for tighter integration for awhile now. Having a full computer-in-a-package -- processor, memory, and even magnetic storage -- where the only ports are power, video/audio, and human interface device ports will enable a wide variety of devices we've only started to think about.

On the other hand, why did it have to be ATI?

I've found Nvidia's offerings much more interesting in this area. They got the idea right in the first place: they made GPUs, then chipsets, then chipsets with GPUs in them. (Admittedly, these were low end and many people reading this have probably panned them, but I'm not focusing on the power-user market here.) In some respects, the only things left were the processor, memory, and storage. Perhaps AMD felt threatened by them?