http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060724/amd_acquisition.html?.v=18

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. struck another blow at Intel Corp., its bigger rival in the market for personal-computer microprocessors, as it disclosed plans Monday to buy one of the dominant makers of graphics chips in a $5.4 billion deal that analysts said could fundamentally alter competition in the semiconductor industry.

As far ATI is in macintosh world is AMD from now as well.

I bet Intel is scared and shaking. :-)

Well if Apple keeps getting their boards from Intel (like the current machines), you may not see many ATI cards in future Macs... from the news story above:

The chief executive of Nvidia Corp., the other dominant maker of graphics chips, said ATI's coupling with AMD will strengthen his hand, because Intel, which sells about 80 percent of the world's microprocessors, will be loath buy graphics chips from a competitor.

Well, I thought the buyout could lead to the combined efforts of getting smaller chips for future processors for both video cards and CPUs in general for both companies.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

This could make for very stable and powerful systems in the future. ATI makes GPU's as well as chipsets for AMD. The chipsets were not the best that that clearly will change now. With AMD and ATI we can now have perfectly tuned components for the CPU, chipset and GPU.

This is all under the assumption that AMD is going to intentionally obliterate ATI's existing customer base. That would be foolish, me thinks.

Actually, I think this will be a good thing... ATI has excellent hardware, but their software end of things has been lacking for the past several years. Especially for support of OpenGL and professional level functions. Hopefully this will change for the better. I doubt AMD will change much of anything with the acquisition and will continue R&D and marketing much the same way it has been.

What does this mean for Apple? I don't know if it really means anything... Apple takes bids and proposals from ATI and nVidia (and perhaps others) when it comes time to pick a new GPU for a new system. Even if the core ownership of ATI changes, I don't see how that will really effect the Apple relationship...

Here's an interesting perspective on the subject:

http://biz.yahoo.com/indie/060726/127_id.html?.v=1

We know that Intel is a very capable marketer (think "Intel Inside") and, as the story goes, Intel is more than ready to throw some big coop marketing money (purported to be hundreds of millions of dollars) after Viiv. Unless AMD has some very compelling advantages, and I do mean VERY, the thought of big coop marketing money along with the already well-known name of Intel will likely be attractive to potential partners that will need to develop the many devices and peripherals compatible with the software