CDRLabs.com

and from ATI.

It looks to be a done deal: "The transaction, valued at US $5.4 billion, is expected to close in Q4 2006 subject to approval by ATI shareholders, court approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions."

ie: rubber stamping.

I'm not really a big fan of this move....

hmmm
this doesn't sound so great to me either

Not good...

well if amd just pours more funds into ati's r&d and comes out with better cards

it just pushes nvidia that much harder to produce better products, and also competition to lower prices

i guess it depends how it will come out in the end.

one possiblity is that it will strengthen AMD and that's good, more level playing field between AMD and Intel.

another is that we'll see better, more powerful embedded graphics CPUs (or is that too much to hope for?). it was AMD who incorporated some of the memory control circuitry into the CPU after all.

or it could be a fiasco, killing off both AMD and ATI, leaving us with Intel and Nvidia alone. just shoot me...

Part of me thinks this could be very good. I've always been a bit leary of going to AMD CPUs because it seems like their chipsets are a bit questionable. (yes, things have improved dramatically in the last few years with NVidia's chipsets, but incompatibilities still loom-- ask the X-Fi owners!) Companies can, and do, test on Intel chipsets. But there are a lot of AMD chipsets just floating out there, kinda buggy, mostly working but sometimes not..

[I know, I know, lots of people have perfectly working AMD machines, but it does seem like there are always weird esoteric issues that end up being traced back to obscure bugs that no one discovered in the chipsets]

I would assume ATI will now have everything they would need (and AMD would demand) to produce pretty solid chipsets for their CPUs...

Of course, this all happens now that Intel is (for now) taking the lead in CPU power..

I think it SHOULD be a good thing, might be a bad thing, but I assume it'll create a very interesting company that SHOULD be able to produce a pretty solid lineup of products.

if you want no problems go with nvidia 4 or the new 500 chipsets with a known good mobo manufacturer, like asus

Can AMD really afford an additional $2.5 billion of debt? It seems like a risky move to me.

This deal is good for ATI and bad for AMD,as was mentioned AMD is in debt and the only way this makes them money is if ATI builds the CPU's/chipsets(ie. all N.America factories are closed).
In any case ATI gets a boatload of money for R&D.

Not really a comment from me, I just wanted to test...

That doesnt sound too bad to me. I wish it was nvidia/amd together though. Never have like ATI cards but I love AMD cpus. I have only owned one Intel in the last 10 years and its the one I am typing on now.I remember my old AMD DX2-80 mhz was my first AMD and never went back till recently. I heard you could OC the Intel pentium D awesome and you can it is blazing fast and cheap. My laptop is a turion 64/ati combo though.