OlSkoolChopper :
Who the PhreakinPhenomHell ever told Hector the lunatic to go buy a company (ATI) that he couldnt afford? Fusion my a$$. You don't take on a $350K mortgage when you can barely pay your rent and you dont go swallow up a $6B company when you know your goin down the craper and your market cap will equal your buy in a year. And yes they did know it because there is no way that they were bilsfuly ignorant even back then that their roadmap was scifi. Yeild, TLb, whatever it was or is, I'm sure that there are plenty of PhDs at AMD who could have told Hector that what he wanted to do was unaffordable and technically too difficult. So instead of hunkerin down and concentrating on a strong mid and low market, they had to go out and blow up their own company by creating the utlimate chip... 40% clock on clock on Clovertown... blablabla. hector did this already in his last job so hes just doing it again. Corporate America is the only place where the more incompetent you are the more money you make and the better jobs you get.
Sure, AMD was a great copany and they made great chips. So what? Change one letter and you have AMC. They made some great cars too... the AMX was a killer musclecar. Then they started making Gremilins, Matadors and Pacers. Then they died. They desreved to die. Because they sucked. You can't live on your laurles of what you made that was great a decade ago. What's on the market now? Nuthin? Then you suck.
Sorry, I have to disagree with you there. When AMD was contemplating the ATI buy, times were different. C2D wasnt on the markert yet, and Netburst was Intels primary offering. AMD was pushing towards 1/3 of the total market, taking share away from Intel every day and doing so with high ASPs/Margins. To go further, the platform concept was a natural and wise progression. As the actual purchase date of ATI closed, reports of C2Ds perfromance were filtering out onto the web, but, for all AMD (or any one for that matter) might have known, it could have been another netburst, which is to say, absolutely no threat to AMDs K8 product line. At that point, Intels offerings sucked. And remember, those offerings (Netburst) were developed by Intels R&D, so for all its much vaunted R&D, Intel still produced a chunk of garbage. Anyone can make a mistake, and everyone does. Netburst
was one of Intels many mistakes, and set the stage for AMD to become a serious threat.
The question still remains, at the time of purchase, did AMD actually know that C2D was as good as Intel claimed, or did they believe the claims to be as hollow as Intels Netburst claims? If they did believe Intel was spewing more BS, there was no reason for them not to buy ATI. If they knew the C2D was an actual threat, then the purchase was a gamble, but still one they would have had to make sooner or later. Here, at THGF, people look at the platform concept from their perspective....enthusiast perfromance. But AMD didnt buy ATI to make a few platfoirms for a handfull of enthusiasts. They bought it to make platforms in the 100s of thousands for enterprise, and for mobile, where the money really is.
The ATI purchase was a good idea, but the timing was all wrong, and not because of AMDs financial situation, or their product line at the time, (both of which were then on very solid ground) but because of the soon to be proven C2D, and the prices which Intel was charging for it.
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