July 24, 2006
Tech alliances
AMD has just purchased ATI. I can see why this happened, but I don't like it. I'm a fan of AMD technologies, and I much prefer nVIDIA products to ATI products. nVIDIA also has a broader product line than ATI, and now makes motherboard controllers, RAID controllers, PCI-E controllers, etc. I'm a big fan of all of their stuff. I would rather AMD have purchased nVIDIA than ATI.
So now with AMD having purchased ATI, what's nVIDIA's relationship with the company going to be? If AMD was in the market for a video-processor manufacturer, ATI was indeed the logical financial choice: ATI is a smaller company in both revenue and market cap than nVIDIA, and ATI actually lost money last year, whereas nVIDIA turned a 13% profit. So nVIDIA wasn't exactly looking to be purchased. But I think an AMD/nVIDIA acquisition would have been much better for both of them than the AMD/ATI acquisition we've got now.
At the time of this writing, ATI shares are obviously up quite a bit, but nVIDIA shares have also taken a boost on speculation that someone - the obvious candidate being Intel - will start looking to acquire nVIDIA. Makes sense to me.
