AMD To Kill ATI Brand

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AMD purchased ATI in 2006 in an attempt to better compete with Intel, and saw losses for several quarters as it dealt with the acquisition. ATI has now hit its stride and continues to pump out powerful cards to compete with Nvidia. AMD has announced that it will do away with the ATI brand name, but will keep producing the same quality video cards of the Radeon and FirePro lines. Citing internal research, AMD believes that it has better brand recognition than ATI. The three reasons given by AMD are:

1) AMD brand preference triples when the person surveyed is aware of the ATI-AMD merger.
2) The AMD brand is viewed as stronger than ATI when compared to graphics competitors (presumably NVIDIA).
3) The Radeon and Fire Pro brands themselves (without ATI being attached to them) are very high as is.

This news comes at a time when AMD is hard at work on its upcoming processors and new architecture, and the CPU/GPU combo project, Fusion. Fusion stands to be the first notable collaboration between the two companies since the acquisition. Fusion products are expected to ship later this year under the Ontario brand. The end of ATI is expected to occur sometime around the release of Ontario, and all products released until then will still carry the ATI logo. Discuss the move in the comments or in the forums.

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Duke on August 31, 2010 11:21PM Maybe they can fix the cursor problem with W7 this decade, then? reply to this

_TheAlexO on August 30, 2010 08:49AM saw that one coming :P reply to this

slick2500 on August 30, 2010 11:41AM Um Isn't Ati pretty much keeping AMD alive atm? reply to this

Waco on August 31, 2010 05:42PM Both divisions are doing relatively well (within reason) last I checked. reply to this

joel.monteiro on August 30, 2010 11:51AM AMD and ATI are one company. reply to this

FashionFish on August 31, 2010 09:17AM ASUS, Intel or EVGA or (insert brand name here), all brand their products with the same corporate name. The major difference here is that ATI has already has a well established presence using that brand name. I think the name change will hurt AMD in the short term and makes no difference in the end. reply to this

Compxpert on August 31, 2010 06:16PM There doesn't really seem to be a purpose to this end other than to unify GPU technologies under the AMD name instead of leaving it separate. Both the main company and ATI are pretty strong on their own and I feel that ATI suddenly disappearing from the packaging and AMD replacing it could confuse consumers briefly. I agree with you FashionFish on that one it will hurt them short term but make no difference in the end. Why bother with this AMD? reply to this

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