The acquisition, which was announced on July 24th, brought ATI to the AMD family for $5.4 billion in stock and cash. The two companies had to be given the okay by anti-trust regulators from Germany, Canada and the US in September, and needed to clear a vote from ATI shareholders on October 13th. With all these hurdles and roadblocks out of the way, ATI and AMD are officially clear to shake up the industry. Said AMD Chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz:

Today marks a historic day for our employees, our partners and our customers as we officially welcome ATI into the AMD family. On day one, we are delivering a winning set of complementary technologies, igniting a new level of innovation and continuing to champion choice for the industry. In the near term, customers gain a new level of choice, and in the long term, we believe the possibilities for innovation are truly limitless.

While ATI will be consumed under the hefty AMD umbrella, Ruiz has said that AMD will maintain ATI’s brand identity, including the familiar ATI logo.

In addition to prompting the creation of integrated graphics solutions for AMD/ATI platforms AMD has plans to produce a CPU/GPU hybrid, integrating graphics and general processing into a single chip for the first time. Dubbed, Fusion, the new CPU/GPU combo chips will be available in late 2008/early 2009, and will be developed for use in laptops, desktops, workstations, servers, and a number of other consumer electronics applications. Said Phil Hester, AMD senior vice president and chief technology officer:

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.

The Inquirer has confirmed that Nvidia will also be developing a CPU/GPU combo, after courting some workers from x86-specialist Stextar. Unlike AMD, however, Nvidia has been more tight-lipped about their plans. That said, a combo chip from Nvidia will likely be based on a 65- or 45-nanometer manufacturing process, and, like AMD’s Fusion, is due out some time in 2008.

AMD currently claims 26 percent of the processor market, with king-of-the-hill Intel claiming 72.9 percent. AMD’s margins have been growing quickly, however, as they’ve claimed nearly ten percent of their current share from Intel over the past year.

Read the AMD press release

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Mike Zazaian is the Editor-in-Chief and Webmaster of TechFreep.com, an online publication dedicated to daily technology and science news. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he majored in Film and Video studies with a sub-concentration in screenwriting. While only a minority of Mike’s formal education encompassed the technology field, he has worked as a web developer, a freelance web designer, and has been a tech enthusiast for the better part of his life.

ATI’s lead in mobile graphic chips has fallen away, and the company now sits behind Intel in market share.

The Intel 915 Alviso chipset, part of the Centrino line, powered the chipmaker to over 43 % of the mobile chip market share, while ATI fell 26.1 percent.

Intel’s second-generation Centrino technology encompasses four points: enhanced mobile performance, integrated wireless LAN capability, extended battery life, and lighter, thinner designs.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Consistent with most technological “arms races,” there are two companies jockeying for the proverbial top spot; and in this case, the distinction belongs to ATI and Nvidia. Both of these companies are consistently reestablishing graphics benchmarks for the other to respond too.

When you consider ATI’s newest graphics card update, it appears as if ATI is focused on upping the ante again. Yesterday, the company announced their new, more affordably marketed graphics card, the RADEON X300 SE featuring HyperMemory.

According to the company, the “new RADEON X300 SE cards pair ATI’s HyperMemory technology with the advanced data-transfer capabilities of PCI Express systems to share system memory for graphics processing, improving system value and performance.”

ATI further details on HyperMemory, by indicating the architecture “dynamically and intelligently uses system memory storage for real-time graphics processing. The amount of local memory is reduced without compromising overall performance.”

Rich Heye, Vice President and GM, Desktop Discrete Products, ATI Technologies Inc., offered these thoughts, “Customers who upgrade to the RADEON X300 SE HyperMemory graphics solution, either when purchasing their PC or adding it to their existing system, can dramatically improve their overall experience. Games, photo editing software and other media all run with superior performance and provide a richer user experience with RADEON X300 SE HyperMemory cards.”

As with all ATI cards, the company will allow 3rd party to produce HyperMemory cards, using the technology developed by ATI. The manufacturers allowed to reproduce these cards include:

- ABIT
- ASUS
- Club3D
- Connect3D
- Diamond
- Gigabyte
- Hightech Information Systems
- Info-Tek Corporation
- MSI
- PALIT
- SAPPHIRE
- TUL
- VisionTek

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.

RADEON XPRESS 200M for AMD will be available from such leading OEMs and ODMs as HP, Sharp, Medion, Acer, Targa, Gateway, NEC, Mitac, Arima, MSI, Compal, Quanta and Wistron.

“ATI is now offering a leading edge PCI Express mobile solution with excellent performance, lightning-fast onboard DirectX 9 graphics and innovative power management,” said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager, Microprocessor Business Unit, Computation Products Group, AMD. “Together with the upcoming AMD Turion 64 mobile technology, we’re helping highly mobile PC customers embrace thin and light platforms for powerful system performance, broad connectivity and superior multimedia capabilities.”

With the introduction of RADEON XPRESS 200M, ATI delivers onboard RADEON X300 class visual performance and features. This visual performance is complimented by POWERPLAY 5.0, an innovation in power management for PCI Express. Through new capabilities such as Dynamic Lane Count Switching (DLCS), power is adjusted on the fly to reduce GPU power consumption by up to 30 per cent.

“ATI has long been a pioneer in integrated chipset technology on notebooks,” said Phil Eisler, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Integrated and Mobile Business Unit, ATI Technologies. “Through working closely with AMD on the development of these chipsets we have a compelling platform to harness the performance of present and future generations of mobile AMD processors.”

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This new technology allows ATI to bring their graphics hardware to mobile computers. According to TechSpot, “This PCI Express-based graphics processor will be offered as a mainstream solution, and comes with eight pixel pipelines, six vertex engines and support for 128-bit DDR, DDR2 and GDDR3 memory.”

The new processor also supports HyperMemory. This allows the card to utilize system resources instead of the on-board-memory. These features will help notebook computers be more capable of handling high-end graphics.

Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest search news.