So is ATI gone forever, as a brandname at least? Apparently not, AMD Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester revealed today. He also indicated the two companies' fusion may not necessarily mean it's curtains for ATI's Intel-oriented chipsets.

Speaking in London today, Hester told Reg Hardware the ATI name will continue to be used in association with what are now AMD's discrete graphics products and its chipsets.

This makes eminent sense if only because its allows Nvidia and its new arch-rival to continue to describe each other as the 'red guys' and the 'green guys'. If AMD dropped ATI, all GPUs - well, the ones that matter - would be all green, and how would anyone tell them apart?

Separately, Hester indicated ATI would continue to be the brand for the Intel chipsets, suggesting that AMD at least wants to continue to offer such product. Whether Intel will let it do so, by withholding future bus licences, remains to be seen. ®

• AMD Fusion to target laptops at first (30 January 2007)
• AMD rebrands ATI chipsets under its own name? (15 November 2006)
• AMD confirms ATI-brand Radeon X1900 card for Macs (7 November 2006)
• Nvidia ships final ForceWare drivers for Blu-ray Disc, HD DVD (3 November 2006)
• AMD releases ATI Catalyst update (1 November 2006)
• AMD: Opteron CPUs now up to 47% cheaper (31 October 2006)
• AMD unveils ATI Radeon X1650 XT (30 October 2006)
• Cool Fusion: AMD's plan to revolutionise multi-core computing (26 October 2006)
• PowerColor brings ATI X1950 Pro to AGP users (25 October 2006)
• AMD and ATI fuse (25 October 2006)
• SGI smacks ATI with graphics lawsuit (24 October 2006)
• ATI to launch Radeon X1650 XT next week? (24 October 2006)
• Intel follows AMD with CPU price cuts (24 October 2006)
• AMD pares processor prices (23 October 2006)
• ATI: all our GPUs will be 80nm by July 2007 (19 October 2006)
• AMD profits, shipments up (18 October 2006)