You know, I was against this from the very beginning, but I changed my mind.

If AMD plays this right they'll have a stable platform to attract business' when they release their next major architecture.

AMD's fabs and engineering prowess (not to mention the decent management) will help stabilize ATI's graphics offerings, and the income from those offerings will help to stabilize AMD in down periods such as the one they're going into right now.

AMD will essentially have to open up Crossfire, so if Nvidia, Intel, XGI, and VIA jump on board we may have a standard dual GPU subsystem.

Despite all executive statements to the contrary, one thing this buy-out (as well as other platform strategies) will surely bring is less choice for the customer.

IMHO even worse, the fact that ATi has agreed to be bought also signifies the end of the high-end GPU race, or rather the charade ATi and nVidia put up over the past few years.

All in all, quite a sad day, today. (unless you were invested in ATi, that is)

I can't see why this is bad. So many good things could come from this.

One is that since Intel will now have a real competitor in the PC market we may finally see notebooks and PCs with something beyond Intel graphics. Wasn't it said that Intel was killing the PC gaming industry with their graphic chips? Now imagine what AMD+ATI could bring to the market that'll probably be cheaper then whatever Intel has.

Another good thing is that maybe some other graphics company could begin to merge itself into the market. Since ATI+Nvidia owned the market with force no other company could compete with them. Now some other company like PowerVR could introduce their product in this confusion.

Damn! Is R600 GPU is not coming out anymore?
If ATI is out of the GPU race then Nvidia can slow down the development of new architecture and charge us more money.

oh well. Nvidia total domination!!!

Stepping away from PCs for a second, one important thing this does for AMD is give them revenue from two of the next-gen consoles, whereas Intel got shut out and nVidia is only in the PS3.

And by "only", I'm not saying the PS3 isn't significant, just that it's only 1 out of 3 next-gen systems.

I'm wondering if AMD plans to spin off ATI's GPU business into a separate company. Otherwise, yes, I fear that the GPU race is over as well.

This gives them a way to have a 'Centrino' type thing for laptop manufacturers. Rather than having to validate all dfferent kinds of setups they can just buy the setup from AMD, and integrate it into their own designs and go.