AMD kills ATI brand

Alas, the day has come when the world of computer graphics cards will no longer be a race between red (ATI) and green (Nvidia).  Instead it’ll be green all over, as AMD just announced that it will be shuttering the ATI brand.  ATI’s product brands — Radeon, FirePro, Eyefinity, and the like — will still remain and will be colored red, but they’ll all now be AMD-branded.

The decision is based on the company’s upcoming Fusion hybrid APUs, which will combine an AMD CPU and ATI graphics chip into one core.  Branding everything as AMD makes things simpler, but we have to question the company’s judgement in the graphics space.  Whereas AMD is still largely seen as a value-oriented second-choice to Intel in the processor space, ATI has a market-leading brand image in graphics.

Only time will tell whether AMD will end up diluting its strength in graphics by associating Radeon with Phenom.  Interestingly, the change would mean that Intel-powered computers with ATI graphics would now have both Intel and AMD stickers on them, so AMD will be offering stickers that say just “Radeon graphics,” without AMD — which seemingly defeats the purpose of killing the ATI brand.

Read on for more about AMD’s decision.

Here’s a slide from AMD about why the company feels consumers had given it “permission” to kill the ATI brand:

Here are the new Radeon logos going forward (current products, like the Radeon HD5800 series, will remain ATI-branded):

AMD's new Radeon logos - notice the AMD-less versions at the bottom, meant to avoid mixing AMD and Intel badging on PCs with Intel CPUs and ATI graphics

Source: TechReport