DailyTech - Reuters Report Claims Intel to Acquire NVIDIA
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4440

Tech Trader Daily » Report Nvidia Shares Goosed By Rumors Intel Will
Buy It
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtrader...el-will-buy-it/

On 4 Oct 2006 21:58:13 -0700, "bbbl67" <yjkhan@gmail.com> wrote:



Wow, that would be an extremely stupid move by Intel if they did
that... almost as stupid as AMD buying ATI!

Tony Hill wrote:

Buing NVidia by Intel being a stupid move is understandable -- the companies
are 'incompatible' (completely different 'culture') so the effect might be
just wasted resources and AMD/ATI gaining near monopoly in a few years in
higher (and more profitable) part of the GPU market (leaving bottom feeder
to nIntel, which Intel has anyways without becoming nIntel).

But why buying ATI is stupid?


rgds
--
Sebastian Kaliszewski

Tony Hill wrote:

It'll never pass by anti-trust regulators anyway. AMD buying ATI to get
into a market where it had previously had 0% marketshare is one thing.
But Intel buying Nvidia to go from a 60% marketshare to somewhere around
80% marketshare is unlikely to ever pass muster.

The anti-trust regulators in the US might be pussies when it comes to
enforcing anti-trust rules against Intel's existing CPU monopoly, but
there's no way that they are going to approve the creation of a new
monopoly.

Yousuf Khan

Sebastian Kaliszewski wrote:

To me, the idea has grown on me. I myself had initial concerns about the
price that AMD is paying for ATI. Paying $5.4B after previous
announcements of expenditures of $2.5B (Dresden) and $3.0B (New York),
seemed a bit nutty. However, it's not like as if AMD is buying a dotcom
bubble economy "potential value" company here, it's buying a company
with real revenues and profits. The revenues will help AMD pay down the
cost of the purchase itself.

Yousuf Khan

On Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:26:05 +0200, Sebastian Kaliszewski
<sk@get.it.off.to.reply.z.pl> wrote:


I've mentioned this a few times in the past. Basically I think there
are a few things. First, AMD is spending a LOT of money to get into a
very low proft business. Second, they are endangering their
relationship with their #1 partner nVidia who supplies more mainboard
chipsets and video chipsets than any other company for systems with
AMD CPUs. Third, they will likely be left at a disadvantage when
trying to sell video chipsets for systems using Intel motherboard
chipsets (probably about 60% of the video card market). Similary
Intel could well pull AMT/ATI's license to produce chipsets for Intel
processors.

But finally and most importantly, loss of focus. The main reason why
I see that AMD has done so well in the past few years and Intel done
so poorly is focus. Intel has LOTS of other businesses in addition to
their CPUs, virtually every one of which is losing money.

Besides which, as you rightly say, Intel and nVidia's corporate
cultures likely wouldn't mesh that well. Similarly I'm not sure that
ATI and AMD's corporate cultures would mesh all that well either. All
in all, I see a lot of downsides and very few (if any) upsides to the
deal.
----------------------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

Tony Hill wrote:

Playing devlis advocate here...


AMD's primary business was low profit to them most of the time (but last 2
years)


As long AMD play it nice, NVidia has not much space left. Intel is known for
screwing their chipset (and other) partners more that once. Telling f**k off
to AMD is not their interest.



AMD/ATI combined is stronger here than ATI alone. Plus AMD has varius IP
cross-licesing agreements with Intel.



It's not so easy. And AMD has much more money for lawyers than ATI alone
(and past performance indicates that AMD is willing to use that)


Well, maybe they foresee the change of focus on the market. Look at this --
CPU's are less & less important for PC's perfromance. With stuff like
physics coprocessors enetering arena importance of CPU as key performance
component even decreases.

In Austria, in the first half of XX centurey, there was a company which kept
allmost total monopoly in a production of horse wagons. They even had
various govement aids like high import taxes for foreign products. They were
so big that they had their own iroworks producing only for them. Then
50-ties came, and all was kaput. The market has vanished. They don't exist
anymore, of course.

CPUs is a business which made both Intel and AMD significant. But will it be
able to keep those companies up in the future (with all their R&D costs and
expenses)?


Thats allost a given.


The main upsides are:
* Ability to create Centrino counterpart
* Better ability to play in commoditised market
* Better ability to play in the middle of the market where bread&butter of
the desktop PC is -- high performance integrated AMD/ATI solutions for stuff
like media center PCs, with quite good playability of games and stuff.
Embedded graphics on coherent HyperTransport link might enable peroformance
unseen in embedded arena.
* AMD's one of the few companies in the world which have apropriate inhouse
know-how as well as state-of-the-art software&hardware for high peroformance
IC design & development. If used properly that ability could possibly
translate into significant improvement in combined company GPU designs.
* Combined company has finally whole platform in their hands -- look how
long it took to have decent chipsets for K7/K8 platforms. VIA & their
chipses which for a few years (since 586B southbridge) f***ing up data in
multi harddrive systems without even acknowledging the problem (only
releasing driver updates which never fully got rid of it) can't be takes
seriously. Now when AMD want's to change something they can just do it and
the chipsets will be there (as they'll make their own).



rgds
--
Sebastian Kaliszewski

Sebastian Kaliszewski wrote:


Well, just when you think that CPU's are less important, along comes
M$ with "Vista" to bring your machine to it's knees...

chrisv wrote:

But give "Vista" half-decent GPU and enough RAM and it will fly even without
Core 2 Duo.

GPU is the key here... And look what AMD bought
Then look if Intels GPUs are half-decent or not, while ATI's even cheap
solutions can be redarded as such.


rgds
--
Sebastian Kaliszewski

On Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:40:34 -0400, Tony Hill <hilla_nospam_20@yahoo.com>
wrote:


I understand your caution here and agree with some of it... *depending* on
how things play out in the various current "markets" and how they evolve.
There's an interesting article here
http://www.edn.com/article/CA6262535.html on the "plateau" in GPU
processing as we know it: "pixel/vertex/triangle growth". The current
artificial layering/segementation of the GPU market has gotten ridiculous -
just look at all the hacks to turn a GeForce into a Quadro, which actually
worked until nVidia decided to add a "fix"(??).

From the above article, the GPU is going to change dramatically in the
relatively near future... with more custom logic, a more CPU-like layout
and that's certainly an area where AMD(/IBM)'s bleeding edge process
technology can make a difference. Without this evolution, GPUs are hitting
the wall of what can be done with standard(-ish) cells and, it would
appear, have nowhere to go; i.e. your "low-profit business" profile gets
lower and lower.:-)

I can see some *potential* synergies here. The AMD/nVidia relationship is
a difficult one to predict as far as future viabilty: as long as the
proposed Torrenzo initiative is an external HT link, it could work and
nVidia can still compete with ATi in the AMD space... users can have their
choice; if it goes on-die, the whole game changes but that's a ways in the
future. With quad core dies on the horizon, how long before heterogeneous
multi-core chips?

It could be that the downside for GPU designers otherwise is err,
oblivion.;-)

--
Rgds, George Macdonald