It's been a long four years, but AMD has finally hits its stride after its acquisition of ATI Technologies way back in 2006. After agreeing to purchase ATI for $5.4B, AMD was besieged with quarterly losses stemming from the purchase, constant pressure from NVIDIA in the graphics market, and beatdowns from Intel (who wasn't exactly playing by the rules of fair business) in the processor market.
With most of its troubles now behind it, AMD is looking to kill off the long-standing ATI brand and bring Radeon and FirePro graphics solutions solely under the AMD umbrella according to AnandTech.
According to AMD's own research in markets from around the world, it came to the following three conclusions:
- AMD preference triples when respondent is aware of ATI-AMD merger
- AMD brand [is] stronger than ATI vs. graphics competitors
- Radeon and FirePro brand awareness and consideration [is] very high
The move will also help to further consolidate AMD's branding which has pretty much gotten out of hand in the past few years [see figure on right]. AMD will begin the transition later this year to phase out ATI branding and move to a more simplified product branding lineup. By 2011, AMD's product lineup will consist of AMD's Opteron for server processors, Vision (which consists of a CPU/GPU hybrid) for consumer processors, and Radeon/FirePro for graphics.
With AMD now taking the discrete graphics market lead from NVIDIA (51.1 percent for AMD versus 44.5 percent for NVIDIA) and preparing to take the fight straight to Intel with three new CPU designs, the next year should be a fruitful one for enthusiasts.
Source: DailyTech
