DAAMIT - Love it or hate it?

OK so when I first heard that ATi/AMD were naming the new entity DAAMIT, I chuckled a bit. I told my buddies, and we all had a good chuckle. I didn't think much of it.

Then I was talking to them about the R600, and it went something like this: "Yeah so DAAMIT's R600 was delayed again."

I just can't do it. I can't say DAAMIT in a serious conversation and not feel like a total boob.

I think it was a stupid move by decision makers to name a company to sound exactly like (what most consider to be) a profanity.

That's what I thought at first, too, but it's all over the web.

Again, at first I dismissed it until I saw this quote:

Don't get me wrong; I don't want to succumb to internet rumors, but this is a nasty one. What's the official word?

Pretty sure that quote is Satire:
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/07/amd-ati-daamit.html

Those articles on bbspot are jokes:

"AMD to Release New Moron Processor"

"AMD Starts Rating Chips in GiggaHertz(tm)"

"AMD Releases Socket 666 Athlon 64 CPUs"


No mention of DAAMIT on the AMD or ATI sites either, of course.

So much for that idea...


lol. Next time I'll do a little more research. Lesson learned.



I saw the quote elsewhere, as well (a quick google will bring them up. For Example).

That article is so funny.

Customers were pleased by the move. "That's what I usually say when I load new drivers on my system, so it seems appropriate," said Kyle Westfall of Wausau, Wisconsin.

buwahahaha!!!!! best part of the article!

Yeah: everyone gets an egg in the face now and then, and I asked for this one. I need to stay away from the Inq. When you're addicted to information, though, it's like a drug: you get it where you can. :?

Anyway; I agree that it was probably in ATi's best interest to merge with Intel rather than AMD, however I'm not sure that I agree it would have been a better merger overall.

Before C2D, AMD's only soft-spot was mobile computing. AMD was gobbling up market share everywhere else. Intel was able to maintain such a stranglehold because (1) their mobile processors were able to hold their ground against AMD's lineup and (2) Centrino made integration simple, inexpensive (relatively), and very effective. AMD didn't have a chipset for mobile computing, and ATi did. A great way for AMD to truly compete against intel was to offer a fully-integrated solution; similar to Centrino.

Add the 'discovery' of the GPU's Floating-point (i.e.stream) processing power to the equation, and it almost seemed like a no-brainer for AMD to acquire ATi. nVidia was far from AMD's grasp in terms of price, so they didn't have many options.

Enter C2D. I'm sure this shook things up a bit, but at some point someone at AMD made the call to keep the acquisition moving despite the impending disaster (for lack of a better word). This is really the decision that comes into question. AMD has finite resources: were they better allocated towards stream/mobile computing, or should AMD have held off on the merger and focused on maintaining the market share for which they so vigerously fought? Was it wise to dilute their resources right after their competitor came out with a product superior to their own?

My personal opinion is that the ATi acquisition, simply for the sake of mobile computing, would have been unwise. However, if AMD can use other ATi assets and IP and apply them to the mainstream CPU space, then it could have been worth the investment.

I do believe that HT does support the aforementioned theory that ATi technologies can be brought to the mainstream space (I'm still hoping for a GPU on HT). I guess only time will tell, though, since we won't know the reasons for the acquisition until it bears fruit.

At any rate, to go back to my original point, I don't believe that an Intel/ATi merger would have had equal worth. The Assets and IP that ATi held weren't nearly as valuable to Intel as they were to AMD (though in guerilla
tactics, Intel could have bought ATi just to prevent AMD from buying them )