NVIDIA/Intel response

With AMD and ATI partnering up, we were curious to see if NVIDIA planned to continue providing nForce chipsets for the AMD platform. After all, with ATI and AMD hooking up, AMD’s “open ecosystem” isn’t quite as open as it once was, as AMD will clearly be stepping up their efforts in the chipset department. To get some answers, we asked NVIDIA’s Director of Public Relations, Derek Perez, the following questions:

FiringSquad: What is NVIDIA’s official reaction to the proposed merger between AMD and ATI?

Derek Perez: We look at today’s news as a positive for the company and there’s a couple of reasons why. Ultimately this leaves us as the only GPU and platform company that will be able to support both AMD and Intel. That’s huge. There’s no other GPU company, no other chipset company that’s going to come close to what we’re offering and that puts us in a really good position right off the bat. If you look at those two pieces of business, GPU and platform technology we’ve got four strong brands, SLI, GeForce, Quadro, and nForce which we’re all right now winning versus ATI everywhere across the board and I think you guys will agree with that.

So if you think about it, it’s kind of like ATI’s thrown in the towel right? Getting beat on both ends, looking for a way out, a little bit like 3dfx a few years back.

We’ll continue to work with AMD on the processor side, they’re a very valued processor partner, we’ve been working with them for a few years, so we’ll continue to work with them on nForce. And of course this has an interesting affect where we can look at this as an opportunity to accelerate our technology to market and kind of extend that lead over ATI. By now being the only GPU provider to be able to work with Intel and AMD gives us an incredible opportunity. So in a nutshell that’s kind of how we look at it.

One of the things that I said to John, you know it’s funny that right now in the PC industry’s most competitive landscape you’ve got this complex merger which can be a distraction for two of the biggest, you know the two biggest number two players in the market. So it will be interesting to see how that goes for them.

FiringSquad: Did you guys have any plans for Torrenza prior to this announcement that have now been affected by the merger?

Derek Perez: No I don’t think any of our product support plans have been changed by this merger, not right now. So when it comes out we’ll support it, but not much has changed on the product side in the past 24 hours.

FiringSquad: One thing ATI has touted as a result of this merger is that their GPU development may actually benefit from this merger, as they’ll have access to AMD’s engineering and manufacturing facilities. What do you make of this assertion and could this lead to NVIDIA perhaps working with IBM again at some point in the near future?

Derek Perez: The question is when? I think the AMD engineers are a bit tied up right now trying to figure out how to repond to Conroe and Woodcrest, and AMD won't have any n-1 capacity for at least two years.
Next up we asked Intel the follow question:

FiringSquad: Now that ATI and AMD have announced that they are indeed merging we were wondering if Intel planned to continue offering CrossFire support in their 975X chipset as well as any other upcoming chipsets in the future? We were also wondering if Intel plans to renew ATI’s chipset license, we would assume that if the AMD merger does go through at the end of this year their bus license would be revoked correct?

Dan Snyder, Intel: We will study the transaction but have no comment at this time about any possible impact it might have on our agreements with ATI.

Dan also reiterated that their official position will “likely be beefed up in the coming days as we look closer at the transaction”, so we’ll just have to wait a few days longer before Intel gives their side of the story.