The AMD-ATI Merger

As someone who builds my own custom PCs (and also as a video game fanatic), I like to keep track of anything that might affect what parts I buy and how much they cost me.  So when AMD bought ATI on July 25^th, I asked myself, “How does this affect me?”  Well, I came up with an answer.

AMD and ATI make a similar product.  Even though CPUs and graphics cards have little to do with each other in themselves, they are designed the same way.  While AMD makes CPUs, ATI makes GPUs; as two different types of processing units, they perform different tasks but are effectively constructed the same way.  Each one reads a set of instructions from its respective memory, interprets them, and returns the processed material back to whatever asked for it.  That being said, the two companies should be able to work together, creating better CPUs and video cards. And who knows, maybe they’ll cost a little less too, if manufacturing costs go down.

I’m really disappointed by the direction NVIDIA and ATI are taking these days.  The graphics card market has basically become an arms race, with each company striving to make a faster card no matter what the cost.  Sure, my new video card is faster than my old one, but it’s also more power-hungry, hotter, louder, bigger (I can’t even replace a memory module anymore without taking out the video card first), and, of course, more expensive.  (Let me clarify that last one.  Both cards fall in the same percentile performance-wise.  But my new one, an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT, cost me $135 more than my 6600GT, after the same amount of time following their release.)