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Officially 10 Years since the ATI AMD merger. Was it a good idea?

It's strange that they weren't profitable because I remember their products being extremely competitive and their market share being high.

The 9700 and 9800 series (I had a wonderful 9800 Pro 256 MB) were legendary GPUs that were dominant in comparison to the Nvidia equivalents. X800 series, X1800 and X1900 were all excellent too if I remember correctly.


You are right and it showed in their market share which was more close to 50% and sometimes even more during the years prior to the merger.

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You are right and it showed in their market share which was more close to 50% and sometimes even more during the years prior to the merger.

9908c0_aca444ea80e14ee69029b643e7313a8d.png


Market-share is meaningless if your making a loss on the products your selling to get that Market-share.
 
I'll just echo what others have said, a healthy amd is better for all of us, without competition nvidia would be able to charge what they like, which they seem to be at the moment!
 
I'll just echo what others have said, a healthy amd is better for all of us, without competition nvidia would be able to charge what they like, which they seem to be at the moment!

Which doesn't necessarily mean providing competitive products for the sake of keeping Nvidia in check to benefit Nvidia consumers.

AMD need to focus on products that are profitable, if they cannot sell enough products in a tier like the low end or very high end to justify production costs and R&D then they should not bother.

Chasing Marketshare at all costs was the mistake ATI made.
 
I had the 9800XT. An incredible card back in the day. just had a quick search in my mailbox and it turns out i bought it from OCUK! back then i promised myself i'd never pay that much for a GPU ever again..

Your order (prices in GBP)
£255.00+VAT x 1 - Hercules 3D Prophet 9800XT Classic 256MB & Half Life 2 Bundle - Retail (GX-029-HE)

Sub-Total: £255.00
Shipping: £8.25
VAT: £46.07
Total: £309.32

If you wish to track your orders progress we have an order tracking facility at http://customer.overclockers.co.uk
 
Well their still trading and if they didn't aquire ATI for Apu's, I have my doubts they'd still be in the cpu game as the AMD acquisition money wouldn't have made a difference in the Intel Juggernaut anyway as Intel would have released faster than what we have now anyway.

RTG is now clawing sales back off Nv with Polaris-sure Nv's still selling more than Polaris, but AMD's up ~7%(?), I'm surprised they've clawed back so much in a short space of time.
RX 480 is a sold card. It also has the “mindshare” for being released on the market first ahead of the GTX 1060 and doing pretty well in DX 12 and Vulkan beating nVidia’s equivalent in many games.
Problem is that with the RX 480 AMD is still not making much profit on those as told by AMD’s RTG head as they are a low margin product and it shows in their recent Computing and Graphics segment revenue which is still below what they had when compared to when the R9 290 series launched which had higher margins because the profit margins are fatter on $550 - $400 graphics cards as opposed to $250 graphic cards.

It's possible that ATI could have secured funding through a share issue, bonds or a regular bank loan back in 2006 which would have given them time to turn things around. ATI were by no means a bad company they just got screwed over by Nvidia and Microsoft over DX10 (to borrow Athlon1800 Dallas analogy it's like when JR Ewing used one of pals to convince Cliff Barnes to invest into a potential oil field that was nothing more then a dust bowl). The problem is comapnies like Nvidia and ATI were ripe for takeovers and ATIs cash position just made them more of a target.
Again ATI’s cash position was not in dire straits. They had over $300+ million in profits in the prior years to the merger.
I think AMD should stop chasing the £400+ market, they don't sell enough GPU's in that segment anyway.

Let Nvidia have it, they already do and there is no way AMD can take it from them.
So put all R&D into making good sub £400 GPU's.

That's a terrible idea. This is the kind of thinking that got their CPU division in the hole. You should never chase the bottom, you should have a product that can compete in all segments and I would argue that it is dangerous to begin with. nVidia can easily produce say a cut down version of the GTX 1070 and produce a chip in the $250 - $300 market segment that could decimate the RX 480. When you have superior technology you have so much options in your arsenal. That is what intel kind of did to AMD. They were doing very good with the R9 290/R9 290X when they launched because they were very competitive with the GTX 780/780 Ti and they made a lot of money. Look at their revenues it was nearly $2.5 billion during that time period.
I would argue that was their last really good competitive product that was going head to head and even beating nVidia.

Fury X despite being good didn't nearly have the impact against the GTX 980 Ti. It was kind of like the HD 2900XT which was okay but fell short going against the 8800 GTX and the HD 2900 series in general didn’t fare will in terms of sales against the 8800 series in general (and it shows in their 2007 revenue) similar to the Fury series which didn’t bring as much revenue as the HD 290 series.
Surely this strategy would put them right back into the budget GPU maker image, that they have been trying to get out of.
Exactly! Even AMD’s CEO Lisa CEO mentioned they are trying to shake the image of budget option. That’s why they are gunning for the 6700K/6900K with Zen.
And to everyone who is talking about Polaris being the budget card. According to interview on PCPER post launch of the RX 480 the goal of the RX 480 was to gain back market share and to a certain extent get developers to focus on developing games focused on GCN GPUs. If they don’t have the market share or if it was less than say 20% like they were Q2 2015 it gives less incentive for developers to optimize games for AMD GPU’s when less than 80% of the market uses AMD GPUs. AMD called it their water drop strategy. I think it’s a good idea. Look at the newer games using DX 12 AMD is beating nvidia in their price range of competing GPUs with the exception of GTX 1070/1080 and smashing nVidia in Vulkan in Doom.
Their next plan is to follow that up with Vega targeted for the high end.
ATI were awesome at some point and made really good cards. I am not sure how they managed to screw that up so royally. I always used to have ATI cards until they screwed up the drivers. I remember I had to keep the same old drivers for about 2 years because had I upgraded I would have lost any 3D functionality. Pathetic.
Never had major issues with respect to drivers on AMD graphic cards. People are still peddling this myth. Was previously a nVidia guy but switched to AMD had been using them over the past 8 years or so. Only major issue was with a R9 290X I used to own which was mostly due to it running on an old AMD 780G motherboard, worked fine on a intel Core i7 MB. Rather I had “Display Driver stopped responding” on a Gaming laptop with nVidia card switched to AMD graphics card on a newer Gaming laptop and the problem went away. So rather had issues with nVidia graphics cards rather than nVidia.

I never said it was AMD, I was talking about ATI. I don't remember the exact year to be honest, but this was a long time ago, pre 2000 possibly. Not 100% sure anymore. At that point I was using exclusively AMD processors and ATI cards.

Pre-2000 makes sense. I remember an article on Boot magazine (now Maximum PC) which compared graphical images in Quake 2 against the Voodoo 2 and other makers in the late 90's and a piece of the rail gun in Quake 2 was complete missing on a ATI Rage Pro graphics card. Their drivers were **** poor but around the 9700 series ATI revamped their driver team and had Catalyst series and they have been great for the most part.

I've had Ati cards around 2007 and that had shocking first release drivers - couldn't even play movies smoothly (and two different cards that did this around same period 4850 I think and 5770), and in both cases it took a few driver releases to fix). I don't think Ati's drivers are rubbish generally, but their initial drivers have often been tripe at least. Talk about rush jobs. I know it's easy to download the latest drivers but when it leaves a bad product impression when the first few driver releases are not great, cannot play movies smoothly etc.

I hope one day to try their products again, but after having the previously mentioned driver issues, only one graphics card so far that has been DOA (AMD card), and one unstable CPU (AMD CPU) in my entire component buying life it puts me off, but I will try again when they release something that does seem to stand ahead of the competition. I don't care about pricing so putting out cheaper products doeesn't interest me, I want perrrrfoorrrmmmaaance :D

Hmm...I have a HD 4850 (brought it because it was single slot card with excellent performance for playing older games Pre-2010) on one of my HTPC and hadn't had issues with it so far. HD 4870 was my first ATI card and had 0 issues with it.
I know you didn't but I would hazard a guess that after all these years it still puts you off. The drivers for ATI's best remembered best remembered cards were not bad though as in 9700/9800/x800/x1900/4870/5870/7970/290 yet this bad driver thing still gets talked about.
Exactly. It seems like people who usually mentions this are as the user mentioned still have this image from the Pre-2000 era. Not saying ATI/AMD drivers are perfect but they have come a long way. Look at Crimson drivers now. I would argue they are as good if not better than nVidia’s. I brought a nVidia GPU this summer and giving compared the UI of Crimson and nVidia, nVidia pales in comparison.
 
Don't forget that AMD is supplying hardware for both current consoles (and supposedly will be for the new Nintendo one as well). That will probably be making most of their profit.
 
Don't forget that AMD is supplying hardware for both current consoles (and supposedly will be for the new Nintendo one as well). That will probably be making most of their profit.

Nope, that's nVidia Tegra on the Nintendo Sheild Switch.
 
That's a terrible idea. This is the kind of thinking that got their CPU division in the hole. You should never chase the bottom, you should have a product that can compete in all segments and I would argue that it is dangerous to begin with. nVidia can easily produce say a cut down version of the GTX 1070 and produce a chip in the $250 - $300 market segment that could decimate the RX 480. When you have superior technology you have so much options in your arsenal. That is what intel kind of did to AMD. They were doing very good with the R9 290/R9 290X when they launched because they were very competitive with the GTX 780/780 Ti and they made a lot of money. Look at their revenues it was nearly $2.5 billion during that time period.
I would argue that was their last really good competitive product that was going head to head and even beating nVidia.

The 1070 is already a cut down 1080, just arbitrarily saying Nvidia can cut it down even more to decimate the RX 480 shows your not thinking about what you are saying.

The 1080 and there fore the 1070 is 40% larger than the RX480, so no, Nvidia like everyone else cannot take large dies and turn them into much lower performance products for half the money.

As for AMD selling £500 GPU's they cost a lot of money to make, they cost a lot of wafer space, they cost a lot of PCB components, they cost a lot of expensive memory chips.

GPU's like that are only viable if you can actually sell them at £500 and in high quantities.

Which AMD have never been able to do, not with the 6970, maybe with the 7970 eventually, not with the 290X, not with the Fury-X.

Its actually AMD's lower and mid range cards that paid for the losses and write off's of AMD's enthusiast range.

The RX 480 has been a fantastic card for AMD. Vega at 1080 performance sub £400 will also be, no need for a card bigger than that to compete with what will be a 1080TI as AMD cannot sell them.

If any reputation is going to be made of it its that Nvidia love to milk their user base charging £700 for the 1080TI.
 
High performance static consoles have already been cornered by Microsoft and Sony.

Nintendo are not going to compete with another one.

So they are doing what they do best, underpowered gimmicky consoles, in this case a hand-held one that also has removable controllers and a dock for your telly.
 
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The 1070 is already a cut down 1080, just arbitrarily saying Nvidia can cut it down even more to decimate the RX 480 shows your not thinking about what you are saying.

The 1080 and there fore the 1070 is 40% larger than the RX480, so no, Nvidia like everyone else cannot take large dies and turn them into much lower performance products for half the money.

You are taking what he is saying a bit too literally - strategically having a top down product line gives you more options for instance just as an example you have a range of possibilities to use salvaged 1070 cores that are still functional but not making the grade for the 1070 including using them sacrificially to disadvantage the competition.
 
There is a huge flaw with all these types of arguments, they are based on fantasy, a fantasy that ATI was a healthy business.
AMD are not working with or licensing anything from a dead business.

AMD paid $5.4BN because that is the cash injection ATI needed to save it.

I think you might be the one leaving in a Fantasy:

AIT's Q3 results prior to the merger:

http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/IROL/10/105421/reports/ATI_Q306.pdf

Like I posted earlier over $70+ million in profit up to that point in their Fiscal 2006 year.

They had over HALF A BILLION dollars in cash/cash equivalents. Hardly a company going out of business.

Rather it was AMD which was going to get screwed when intel launched the Core 2 Duo around that time, which shows in their CPU division losses post Core 2 Duo launch.
 
You are taking what he is saying a bit too literally - strategically having a top down product line gives you more options for instance just as an example you have a range of possibilities to use salvaged 1070 cores that are still functional but not making the grade for the 1070 including using them sacrificially to disadvantage the competition.

Salvaging the salvaged because it does not make the salvaged grade?

The 1070 is already a salvaged 1080, IE the 1070 is a chip not making the grade for the 1080, the 1070 is a salvaged chip.

Its an easy argument to make, the fact is the GTX 770 was not made from the salvaged 550mm^2 780TI, that would be the 780.

The 432mm^2 290X was not the 280X, salvaged that was the 290P.

What you are saying was never actually done by anyone because they are too big and too expensive to make into GPU's like that.
 
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Market-share is meaningless if your making a loss on the products your selling to get that Market-share.

True. But at least during that time period they were not taking losses in the Mid 2000's.

Over $200 million profit in 2004, $15 million in 2005, over $70 million up until Q3 2006. Hardly in trouble, or taking losses.

However, they did take a loss with the HD 2000 series, which was as expected as it wasn't as competitive against the 8800 series.
 
Actually AMD only started really having issues,when Nvidia managed to cut down die sizes and costs with Maxwell. Nvidia managed to sell smaller dies with less RAM chips for more money and AMD was selling larger dies with more RAM chips for less money.

ATI and indeed some of the earlier AMD cards,did well since ATI and AMD managed to produce small reasonably well performing chips which meant they could maintain margins even at lower prices.

Its the same with CPUs - they are stuck selling much larger chips for a fraction of what Intel would charge.

This is why I hope any £300 to £400 Vega chip is NOT using HBM2,since the cost of packaging,etc is probably quite high until it becomes a common way of doing things for graphics cards.

If Vega ends up being some 400MM2 chip with HBM2 they are only charging £400 for,then AMD is not going to increase margins. Nvidia has massive margins which have doubled since the Fermi times.
 
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Sometimes they will sell a second salvage part like the 5830, if it mean not throwing it away.

It was also done with the Tahiti LE (7870XT) tho contrary to belief that was not AMD, that was TullCorp (Powercolor/Club3D) repurposing their own salvaged 7970's and 7950's.

As opposed to throwing them away...
 
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