More than four years after buying ATI, AMD has announced the abandonment of the ATI brand which was until now used for all graphics products. After a study which showed that the ATI+AMD merger had a positive impact on the perception of AMD products and that the AMD brand was stronger opposite Intel and NVIDIA than the ATI brand, as well as the fact that the Radeon brand was now sufficiently well established, AMD has concluded that the time is right to put all its products under a single brand name. This is a logical simplification which should facilitate the marketing of the “Fusion” products.
To recap, soon after buying ATI, AMD drew our attention to the development of MPUs (Media Processing Units), components which were to integrate the CPU and GPU on the same die. AMD proceeded to make as much noise as possible about these future products and introduced the Fusion brand as their name for them and also to sell the acquisition to investors. After numerous delays, AMD are no longer making MPUs but rather APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) and the first models should start to arrive at the end of the year or the beginning of 2011. The Fusion brand, confirming its role as smokescreen, is also being shelved.
Although AMD oversaw the departure of a good few important figures at ATI, such as former CEO Dave Orton as well as successive CTOs Bob Drebin and Raja Koduri, it would be wrong to think that ATI had completely disappeared within AMD. Excellent execution by old ATI teams over the last few years has allowed some of those team members to take on responsibilities within AMD and bring more efficiency to other divisions. Rick Bergman for example, who headed up the ATI PC Business Unit and who is now in charge of all AMD products, or Joe Macri, MR GDDR at ATI, who is now CTO for the AMD Client Division, are examples of this.
Although some people will probably remain nostalgic for the ATI brand for some time (after each publication of a graphics card review in which we speak about GPUs developed by AMD, we still receive mails from readers informing us of our mistake!), its disappearance reflects the development of the single company formed by the merger. Current products won’t however be affected and will retain ATI branding. The new GPUs introduced in October as well as the APU graphics cores will however be named AMD Radeons, or AMD FirePros for the pro versions.
Note that there was one major advantage for AMD in preserving the ATI brand. It facilitated the use of its GPUs on Intel platforms. Intel would not of course have liked to see the appearance of an AMD logo beside its own. Although the agreements between AMD and Intel and more recently between the FTC and Intel have penalised certain sales practices which may have proved problematic at this level, AMD will avoid rubbing its competitor up the wrong way and therefore retain part of the ATI red and also come up with alternative logos which don’t have the AMD brand on them, just mentioning Radeon or FirePro.
Lastly, the Vision brand introduced to represent AMD platforms, and partly to attempt to mask the enormous headstart given to Intel CPUs, will be strengthened. It will become the basis of all marketing concerning the general consumer platform, which includes CPUs, which will therefore see their own brand slightly overshadowed.
