The future

FiringSquad: The graphics industry moves so much faster than the CPU industry, where new GPUs are typically released every 6-9 months. Would a unified CPU/GPU be able to keep up with this pace or does AMD see this pace slowing down?

Jon Carvill: Though this merger, AMD and ATI have the ability to leverage each other’s respective strengths in manufacturing for competitive advantage. AMD benefits from ATI’s skills and expertise in aggressive product transitions. ATI in turn benefits from AMD’s expertise in world class manufacturing processes and systems.

FiringSquad: What will consumers be able to buy in 3 years that they wouldn’t have been able to if the merger had not gone through?

Jon Carvill: It’s really hard to talk about what we’re expecting three years out. There’s some details in the press release specific to where we want to be on the platform side but the focus is on the four main areas that we discussed. So that’s creating open customer-centric platforms in the commercial market, in the mobile market, our consumer digital entertainment, and then for emerging markets. That’s really where the focus is going to be and how we can innovate on those four main markets specifically. That was really the pillar that really helped drive this deal through, that we see some real opportunities for the two companies to innovate in ways that have never been done before in the industry. It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen in the next four years but I would say that those are the four main areas that you’re going to see some incredibly cool things come down the pipe.

FiringSquad: Whenever you’re dealing with a merger of this size, it has the potential to cut down choices, but you guys seem to think this will actually expand choices is that correct and could you elaborate on why you feel this way?

Jon Carvill: That’s a fair statement and from an open, customer-centric approach ultimately what we believe is that customers are going to have as much choice as they have now and they’re actually going to have another choice because this merger will create another choice from a platform standpoint. So it’s more choice for customers and allowing them to customize a solution that’s unique to their needs.

FiringSquad: Are there any possible anti-trust concerns for this merger at this time?

Chris Evenden: Well as a result of this merger there will still be two graphics companies and two processor companies. Anyone competing in the same industry as Intel, you know you have a hard time complaining about the market power when you’re in the same industry as Intel. So if you were to propose that ATI and AMD merging together was anti-competitive then you’d have to expect that Intel would be broken up first.

Jon Carvill: And ultimately from a monopoly perspective, ATI-AMD is nowhere near that, so from our standpoint, we don’t expect to have any issues there.

FiringSquad: Will we see AMD continue on ATI's road to promoting a Crossfire solution for PC game hardware physics effects?

Chris Evenden: We’re still going to do that. I mean, why wouldn’t we? We’ve got some really, really cool stuff coming from there, it’s one of the things that I’m really excited about. There are two things at ATI I’m really excited about, one is handheld and the other is the GP-GPU stuff, the general purpose GPU stuff and absolutely I’m a physicist I’ve got a degree in physics and I’m totally fascinated by this stuff. It’s a different sort of processing, think of a continuum of processing, with different sorts of processing for different applications, and certain applications translate very well, they’re highly parallelizable and physics is one of them, graphics is another one and other random things like fluid dynamics, you know there’s a bunch of stuff out there and for those applications it’s hard to beat the parallelism you’ve got in a GPU. CPU’s just can’t compete.

FiringSquad: Intel has developed their own solution for integrated graphics but game developers like Epic's Mark Rein feel such a solution hurts game companies with their underpowered graphical solutions. With this AMD-ATI merger, will we see the company develop and promote a more powerful integrated graphical solution?

Chris Evenden: Well the merger will really allow us to innovate on the PC platform some more so we should be able to. Like I said earlier there will always be a range of graphics performance on the PCs, there will be integrated graphics forever on PCs because there are certain users who want that. But you know people have been telling us for a decade that integrated graphics is good enough, when are you going out of business? We’ve been hearing that literally for about a decade from people.

Jon Carvill: It all comes down to what kind of user you are, you know Brandon I’ve worked with you on enough motherboards from a Radeon Xpress standpoint that you know you can play a lot of entry level games at a reasonable frame rate but the reality is that if you’re a hardcore gamer or you’re just a gamer in general you’ll probably want something more.

Chris Evenden: I’m playing Oblivion at the moment myself.