No more ATI?

JDR13

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Sadly, it seems that AMD is dropping the ATI name brand. :(

They will still produce graphics cards, including the Radeon line, but only under the AMD name.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/19547

It's going to take some getting used to, not seeing ATI anymore….


*Edit* I guess this probably should have been posted in the off-topic forum.
 
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Tech Help is better. Just as ATI is getting a name change I've requested Tech News etc. go here and the eds agreed. They just care to change the name.

I'm not sure I care one way or another. I've always like AMD's processors but never cared for ATI's Video Cards . I've liked the fact that a Canadian company, ATI, managed to hold its own against its bigger rival, unlike Corel, but that became meaningless when AMD bought them out.

As far as names and companies go the only one I've hated was when 3Com bought US Robotics and changed its name. 3Com was never the pioneer they claimed to be but USR was, and USR was the cooler name. 3Com is now synonymous with a cheap product, USR is dead, and Palm is the bigger name on its last legs - and that was split in at least two directions.

Getting back to ATI, this was part of what I was talking about in the Fermi thread - the reason AMD purchased this company, as I pointed out in class today, was for the GPGPU capabilities and adding them to the CPU - to smooth the process on integration and heterogeneous programming. This gave it a marked up on Intel and keeps ATI competitive with nVidia, both of whom have been pretty scared of this move.
 
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It's just a name really so it won't really change much.

It does however make some sense marketing-wise.As far as I'm aware ATI has been having the upper hand in the GPU war for some time now and if their new GPU series(pressumably HD 6xxx) are as successful as their predecessors the AMD Brand will get stronger.
 
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It's just a name really so it won't really change much.

Oh I agree, in reality, nothing is really changing. Like Lucky Day mentioned, ATI died the day AMD bought them. Still, I think it's a bit of a shame that they're eliminating the name.

Truth be told, I'm more of an nVidia guy myself, especially in recent years. I did like ATI though, and have owned at least 5 or 6 of their GPUs over the years. In fact, my first 3D card was a '3D Rage Pro' back in 1997.
 
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It'll be odd owning a.. what? AMD graphics card? AMD 5870? That'll be weird.
 
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There was an article on ARS about this and talked about how Intel must be seeing red. They've built themselves on their "Intel Inside" brand. Not uncommon to see Intel Inside right next to an ATI logo. Now that logo will be AMD, their chief competitor.

I used ATI cards for a long time. For whatever reason, every nVidia card I have owned seemed to have the colors way off in their default mode, but the ATI cards seemed just about perfect right out of the box.

I ended up switching to nVidia a few years ago though when all the reports I was reading said that for the money, the performance was better with nVidia. Not sure if that is still the case though, but I switched back to Intel from AMD for the same reason at about the same time.
 
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I am really surprised that we haven't seen a better combination of CPU and GPU after AMD bought ATI though.... I was expecting to see Radeon Amdeon 8 core wounder computer.... better integration between CPU and GPU... GPU can handle floating point operations and other math it rocks at CPU handle the rest everything is seamless.... but perhaps they have been afraid of intel boycotting their graphics card completely if they did something like that. I don't see how changing the brand name is going to help that in any way though.... acctually it sounds kind of stupid to me... they could lose a lot of sales on this.

Unless of course the combined CPU, GPU super computer is cooming ( keeps fingers crossed )
 
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Unless of course the combined CPU, GPU super computer is cooming ( keeps fingers crossed )

It is. One of my good friends is working on one of those projects. His chip is actually going into a tablet PC, but from what he told me, it is pretty awesome and even in a PC would crush a lot of what is currently out there.
 
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Really? sorry to be skeptical about that but…….. if he were indeed working on that wouldn't he be on and NDA not to reveal anything to anyone ?
 
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Probably! He didn't give me any real details (and I would not have understood them if he did), and one of the produts that will be using his chip has already been announced and previewed (I'll post the link later when I get home), so I doubt there is much risk there.
 
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Really? sorry to be skeptical about that but…….. if he were indeed working on that wouldn't he be on and NDA not to reveal anything to anyone ?

There is no NDA needed, its called CUDA and Fire Stream and OpenCL and DirectCompute and Alphaworks and what have you, as I've mentioned n the Fermi thread on this.

You want a name of a machine? How about Tesla? There are several HPC (highly parallel computers) GPGPU out at any of the National Labs and in China.

My research is in OpenCL and I will be doing a cross comparison of the performance of my software on both a 5870 and an nVidia G285.

Your argument regarding floating point operations with GPU's being better is less than half right. GPU's still do not do proper IEEE floating point due to legacy issues so this is part of the problem.

Full integration of CPU/GPU is not likely to ever happen as these are very different chipsets. The calls in 2002+ for the end of the CPU for GPUs were too soon and extremely naive.

GPGPU programming is essentially a hack. What we are seeing with (the defunct) Laramie and other new CPU designs, such as i5 and i7, is however more vectorization on the chip itself - probably stripped down versions of the cores like having less cache for more processors. A specialized device for graphics will always be around regardless, but what we really need to do is remove the bottleneck of the PCIx slot and the memory swapping that the CPU needs to use as a control device, and then use a chip design optimized for general purposes and not specific to graphics (ie - an int3 for x,y,z coordinates is a waste on general purpose programming) and yet not have the overhead of cache, etc. that modern CPU cores have.

That's what the real aim is, and its not that simple.
 
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funny, because I was just asking a senior what kind of video card the iPad had in relation to GPGPU programming as Snow Leopard has OpenCL native in the OS. Well I guess its some funky integrated chip so one from a more standard brand is a good sign. Also, I guess the iPad's use a version of the iPhone OS which makes more sense than Snow Leopard, so I doubt its GPGPU capable at this point.

At the same time I asked him this he volunteered he demo of the Unreal Engine posted in the new KB thread. :)
 
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AMD Ontario: AMD’s New Netbook Processor [Update: Benchmark]

Here's the link. I thought he had sent me a link to a review on the tablet, but it's just the processor. He said it is going to be used in a tablet though.

Cool so it is finally on its way! I am waiting to see what they can do for desktop computers!

There is no NDA needed, its called CUDA and Fire Stream and OpenCL and DirectCompute and Alphaworks and what have you, as I've mentioned n the Fermi thread on this.

Yeah I know about these stuffs. But that's more like a GPU with lots of CPU features. A true integration for a desktop computer is not something we have seen yet.

One big problem that could be solved is when you program a graphics heavy application, you still can't have that much integration between CPU and GPU, especially store back or shared ram features for example.

Now the graphics card ram is a faster and more expensive kind… but I am seeing a true integrated chip as really fast… shared fast ram, and no external bus to connect the GPU and CPU granted the new PCI super express interfaces is really fast. That's also going to increase what we can do in terms of integration for games + our computers will be much much faster. There remains problem to solve with general purpose, branch-prediction, hardware interupts and lots of other things, but I don't think it is anything todays engineering can't get past.
 
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I think it's a bad idea.

I would think "ATI" is more recognizable than "AMD" and it's possible the average PC gamer who knows "ATI" and "RADEON" graphics cards have no idea AMD bought them.

At least they're keeping "RADEON".
 
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well you have to do something. Multiple product lines/names severely confuse a company. Having worked at a company with a compound name from our merger it left legacy issues within the company over which side knew what they were doing and caused issues with more division in the corporate culture.
 
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