AMD To Kill ATI Brand

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.