[geeks] Interesting ATI/AMD news

[nate at portents.com]

> AMD is supposedly making a bid to buy ATI, or at least that's what I've
> been reading lately.
>
> Interesting because: ATI is nVidia's most direct competitor, and because
> ATI makes chipsets for a lot of Intel's branded motherboards.

Well more signficantly ATI and NVIDIA see the writing on the wall - the
GPU/CPU fusion, at some point in the future.  At least, increasingly, GPUs
are becoming more generalized, and capable of running non-graphics
software well.

People have been playing around a lot with writing programs for GPUs, like
this sort algorithm:

http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html

Someone already wrote all of frogger in pixel shaders (i.e. all game logic):

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/shadercomp/results/

And of course there's been a lot of buzz about physics implimentations
running on GPUs instead of CPUs or dedicated physics processors.

Etc. etc.

That, and ATI has useful manufacturing resources, a complimentary
corporate culture, and useful patents like this:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7,069,421.PN.&OS=PN/7,069,421&RS=PN/7,069,421

BTW, if you want to believe the Inquirer, they say that Intel didn't renew
ATI's chipset license:

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33225

- Nate