AMD dumps ATI brand

AMD “plans to get rid of the ATI branding on its graphics line,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes reports for ZDNet. “The reasoning for this is two-fold. First, the AMD believes that dragging along two brands – the AMD brand and the ATI brand – is unnecessary since consumers it seems find the AMD brand stronger than the ATI brand.”

MacDailyNews Take: The ATI brand had at least (and sometimes more than just) the illusion of being equal to or better than NVIDIA at times. The AMD brand has no such illusion in comparison to Intel. Therefore, the wisdom of this move is questionable.

Kingsley-Hughes reports, “Existing products on shelves won’t see a name change, but new products will be branded AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.”

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“The other reason behind this shedding of the ATI brand is new products,” Kingsley-Hughes reports. “Specifically Fusion, which brings together a melding of CPU and GPU. The first of these products, codenamed Ontario, will feature two low-power “Bobcat” CPUs combined with a Radeon GPU. This is expected to ship later this year. The more powerful Llano which features a quad-core Phenom II with a GPU is on track for the first half of 2011.”

Read more in the full article here.