AMD and ATI: Will their technologies merge as well?

Sunnyvale (CA) - The opportunity is huge: A personal computing platform with low power consumption, designed for mobility, merging a high-performance 64-bit computing platform with the parallel processing power of one of the most capable graphics platforms ever developed. When you see the prospects in terms of the fully assembled jigsaw puzzle that they jointly announced on Monday, it may appear that AMD and ATI have managed to fit all their pieces together. At last, a newly reinvigorated company will have a complete, competitive response to Intel's Centrino.

It's when you ask both sides of the merger agreement to assess the inventory of all the pieces they plan to assemble, as TG Daily did this week, that you start to notice some subtle, but pronounced, differences in the two partners' view of this colossal opportunity. It's as though we were to follow the story of the two characters in the TV commercial after they had accidentally discovered that their peanut butter and their chocolate tasted great together: Their new objectives have the same basic premise, but there's a disparity over which part gets to be the creamy coating and which the yummy nougat.

It's a question of which part goes on the outside and which part is subsumed, in a sense, in the middle. This week, we spoke with high-ranking representatives from both AMD and ATI, asking them to describe the new platform they have in mind. There don't appear to be pieces missing; instead, the problem appears to be some pieces left without a place in the puzzle after it all comes together.

The whole system perspective

From ATI's perspective, according to representatives we spoke with there, that company faced a serious evolutionary hurdle: In order for graphics processing to evolve, the underlying system had to evolve as well. And if ATI didn't have a voice in this process, its product line would have nowhere to go but sideways.

"It's rather like making a car by just focusing on the engine, right?" posed Chris Evenden, ATI's director of public relations. "There comes a point in which making the engine better doesn't actually make the car any better...At that point, it starts making more sense to look at it from a whole system perspective."

Intel's Merom architecture - which extends its Centrino mobility platform - lowers the power consumption on notebook systems considerably. AMD needed a response to that; and as Evenden explained, some of what had been considered AMD's architectural virtues may have proven to be obstacles to that end. With memory having a direct connection to the CPU via the HyperTransport bus, he explained, every time an ATI graphics processor placed a directive to refresh the screen, memory would need to be accessed, and that means going through the CPU.

"That's an issue, because keeping the CPU awake requires more battery power," said Evenden. "You could conceive, in the future, of integrating the GPU into the CPU so when the computer's sitting there in idle - which is pretty much most of the time - you can switch off the CPU all that time where it isn't being used."

Both companies speak of "integration," not on just the obvious financial level, but the architectural level as well. ATI foresees a day where it can be part of an organization that can change any part of the PC platform it wants to, in order to develop an innovative product. ATI's Senior Vice President of Marketing, Rick Bergman, refers to this as "the platform strategy" - the joint vision that his company and its future partner see themselves driving toward.

"As we look out in time," Bergman told TG Daily, "[we see] the platform strategy becoming more and more dominant. The PC customers that we have, the end consumers, are looking for solutions at that level, partly because the problems that we're encountering now are tough problems, like the power issue. You can try to solve it the way AMD does today, where they get different pieces from different companies, but that certainly doesn't create the best solution, nor is it totally efficient as well. So once we can control all these pieces and come up with the best solution, it really changes the dynamic. That's how we saw it, and that's the same vision that AMD saw as well. We are totally aligned there."

Bergman's colleague, Chris Evenden, put it this way: "If you think about the PC architecture, it's been fairly stagnate for several years. There's been little significant change to PC architecture for awhile. The last big change that people point to is PCI-Express. You look at that and think, 'That was just a new bus protocol.' It's hardly earth-shattering. It didn't conceptually change the architecture in any way. Whereas, now having [CPUs, GPUs, and chipsets] under one roof, we can actually change the architecture, and still make it a PC. It's still just as programmable as any other PC, but we can really customize it for certain applications."