ATI brand to live on despite AMD buyout

AMD has finalised its buyout of graphics chip maker ATI, although the ATI brand name will not be lost in the corporate merger.

Bob Drebin, CTO of the newly created PC Graphics Group at AMD, claimed ATI's roadmaps and project groups had not been changed or reduced since the takeover.

He added that discrete graphics cards will never be phased out and they will always carry the ATI brand name.

AMD also announced that it will release a processor combining the CPU and GPU (graphics processing unit) on one die in late 2008 or early 2009. The new platform is codenamed Fusion and it aims to offer "good levels of 3D as standard " said Phil Hester, senior vice-president of AMD.

Hester said that the new CPU/GPU processors would offer a good Microsoft Vista experience as a minimum.

On his first day as an AMD employee, Drebin also announced that by 2010 AMD hopes to release a Teraflop CPU/GPU processor. He showed an example of how this would be achieved: 48 GPU pipes x 8 Flops/cycle x 3GHz = 1 Teraflop (peak performance) per socket.

This bears some relation to the Radeon X1900 and X1950 series as they both contain 48 GPU pipes, which suggests they may well be the basis for the current design.

Intel is taking a different approach to Teraflop computing. Instead of adding GPU functionality, it aims to offer 80 3.1GHz cores on one die by 2010.

AMD believes the Teraflop chip will be as important as the 'Hammer' architecture released in 2003 that offered 64-bit extensions. Graphical capability will simply be another set of x86 extensions, much like MMX and 64-bit that was bolted onto x86 processors.

Drebin admitted that the disadvantage of the new CPU/GPUs was: "everyone has to pay for it". Therefore GPU functionality will be limited to keep costs down.