ATI, the video card maker, is dead. Started in 1985, the Canadian company was acquired by chip-maker AMD in 2006. For the last four years AMD has let ATI be, creating great video cards such as the Radeon series…until Today. AMD has deleted the ATI nomenclature from it’s databases. Long live AMD!!!
Ok so here’s the story. AMD is moving towards the CPU-GPU combination systems. This is used for energy and space saving. Remember when the first MacBooks and Mac Minis came out? They had an Intel GPU950. That combination GPU share the main system RAM with the CPU, which while saving money offers a lesser performance. The marketing geniuses at AMD said something like…”having 2 names for this combination system would be confusing to users” (disclaimer: that is NOT a real quote).
AMD also redesigned all their stickers for the chips. As you can see, the top row has AMD on it and the bottoms don’t. This is so Intel based machines that have what were ATI chips, don’t have a name clash.
On a related note, Intel agreed to purchase Infineon’s mobile chip business for 1.4 billion dollars. This will help Intel increase it’s presences in smartphones. Now only if Intel would put those ATI…er AMD graphics cards in my smartphone.
