AMD Buys ATi For $5.4 Billion
AMD and ATI today announced plans to join forces in a transaction valued at approximately $5.4 billion. The combination will create a processing powerhouse by bringing AMD’s technology leadership in microprocessors together with ATI’s strengths in graphics, chipsets and consumer electronics. The result: A new and more formidable company, determined to drive growth, innovation and choice for its customers, particularly in the commercial and mobile computing segments and in the rapidly-growing consumer electronics market.
Nice! [AMD+ATI]
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Ars has a good summing up of some of the analyses circulating:
a PCIe video card with high-bandwidth GDDR3 will outperform a GPU that's placed in a cHT socket to share a pool of DDR2 with the CPU. As far as it goes, it is, in fact, correct that putting 512MB of GDDR3 on a daughtercard with the GPU and linking it to the CPU over PCIe will get you more performance than just dropping a GPU into a cHT socket. This is just throwing hardware and money at the problem, though.
The point of doing a cHT-compatible GPU that's a drop-in replacement for a second Athlon is that it's much, much cheaper and less wasteful than a dedicated daughtercard (with a dedicated cache of GDDR3), and the performance is pretty good. So from a price/performance standpoint, glueless cHT and a shared CPU-GPU memory pool will beat the more expensive daughtercard solution by a significant enough margin to make it attractive to many gamers.