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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: grimes who wrote (199678)	5/31/2006 11:29:43 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

"but isn't the design and production of graphics processors highly specialized" The design is, the production isn't. nVidia and ATI use contract fabs. So they give up quite a bit on performance and power consumption to get the lowest cost per die.

To: grimes who wrote (199678)	5/31/2006 11:43:46 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

grimes, I am way over my head on this subject, so bear with me, but isn't the design and production of graphics processors highly specialized - an area where AMD brings little to the table? I don't think AMD would bring anything to the table as far as design of graphics chips is concerned. But AMD could bring a great deal in production, since AMD process technology is more advanced than those of foundries (assuming that the graphics merger partner would use AMD manufacturing capacity for discrete (high end) production. And manufacturing capacity. This being the case, how does it further AMD's business to attempt to supervise the integration of ATI logic into AMD chips when various other solutions (NVDIA eg) are available 'off chip'. The high end will remain off chip, because of the size and power consumption of the chip. Low end is a very big chunk of the market, and it is exclusively integrated. The graphics chip is integrated in the northbridge in Intel chips (which have a direct connection to memory). On AMD platform, integrated video is off chip, but has to access memory that is connected directly to the CPU. So in case of AMD, on-CPU-die graphics is saving one hop to memory, and is not traveling over the HT bottleneck. HT is a bottleneck in this case, because the bandwidth is 4 GB/s, while CPU access t memory is 12.8 GB/s. So for AMD, transition of low end video to CPU is natural (more natural than in Intel's case). Also, (regarding off-chip vs. on-chip) integration always reduces costs. There was also some talk (again) of AMD integrating PCI-Express links to the CPU. This is another chipset feature (possibly) migrating to CPU (after memory controller). Is an alternate possibility to form alliances with ATI, NVDIA, etc to tightly couple graphics processing capability to AMD processing complexes via cHT links? These alternatives are available to AMD without spending $ 4 bil + and incurring the myriad distractions that would attend the speculated aquisition. Another method would be for AMD to license the IP, or some joint venture, where the graphics company would get some royalty. BTW, I don't see AMD spending $4B on an acquisition. If anything, it would likely be a merger, and if so, more likely with nVidia than ATI. Joe