Summary
AMD has ATI- a perfectly good graphics core technology The market isn't only PCs and notebooks AMD's demise has been 'news' for the past 25 years, yet they are still around, go figure. And yes, good companies lose good people all the time, that doesn't mean we should bury them prematurely. Apple is a prime example of a company that we all wrote off, remember their Lisa and the Newton? But look at them now, not only moving 'i' hardware, but also doing the backstroke in the revenue stream of supplying content. Intel and AMD are a David and Goliath story, and it has been that way for a long time. They aren't going to kill Intel, but every once it a while they get to bean them with a pebble and gain a better market position, like they did in blade servers.
Analysis
Let's look into my crystal ball, what do we see?
In the future, people will want access to more information and better entertainment, and in case you have not figured it out yet, the world really does revolve around the display and the display content, not the processor.
So why on earth would AMD want to merge with NVidia when it has a perfectly good graphics team and product in ATI? Just to take them off the street as a competitor in the PC market segment and grab market share? (maybe not such a bad idea, someone will have to look at the numbers).
The real action is not happening in the PC and notebook graphics segment, all that is pretty much commodity product.
The action, in the future, is going to be right in your hand, with HD quality displays on your 'handheld', a 4G network to deliver content, and in the backend servers to supply that content. Intel is already on that road, with the ATOM processor. The name of the game is performance at really low power.
Hopefully AMD's strategic marketing is looking at both the handset and the backend server requirements, to craft the right products in the future.
Move over PC, you are not the only game in town anymore.
