I wish I could come up with some nefarious connection between the $622m lifeline from Abu Dhabi and the recently removed pictures from the Iranian supercomputing website showing crates of kit marked with an UAE located company's name on the side.

But I'm sure it's fine...

AMD might have an OK product, but they are fairly pussified on the business side of things. You hear more whining out of AMD (because of Intel) than almost any other core PC component provider. Blaming everyone else will not make you successful. I sort of hope they fail and give Intel total market share. "Multiple customer options" and all that crap have lead to confusion for businesses who don't really care who makes their processor (or OS, or storage, etc...) as long as it works.

Fuck AMD and fuck other products that create a larger than necessary market.

But then again has no one ever yet learned those wonderful takeover financial advisors true ulterior motive is not to create a working organization from disparate and opposite parts but one in which they ensure the the maximum four way payment in the forms of assorted commissions with numerous additional charges plus asset stripping fees and four very large helpings from the same cake with the least possible amount of work for themselves !

Plus they have the gall to take the icing off the cake as well as another fee !

Very nice but extremely profitable work for some , but the price is far higher for those that are made redundant in the short term process of amalgamation of an workable entity !

Great, AMD pretty much killed ATI. I used to like their products and customer support. I suppose the products are more or less the same, but the support is now terrible. Right now, I wouldn't buy an ATI graphics card.

I don't recall the details. Was ATI in financial trouble when AMD bought them? Were they going to die anyways? I wouldn't feel quite so bad about it in that case.

If AMD went bust, taking ATI with them, who would compete with Intel and nVidia? Even though I'm more likely to buy Intel and nVidia products these days, I still want someone else around to try and tempt me out of it.

OK -- I give up. How does one test goodwill impairment?

If we lose AMD look forward to Intel processor prices going up. WAY UP. Oh should I even remind of us all of Intel's fight against processors speed increases back when AMD was introducing faster ones to the world about the time of the 500-800mhz CPUs? Like'em or hate'em we need AMD because monopolies suck.

"we need AMD because monopolies suck."

Yeah, of course! That's what everone was saying back when the vastly superior Motorola 68k architecture got shafted in favour of that Intel crud. So we got rubbish CPUs running a rubbish OS for years to come. Market forces bite me!

Totally agree! I remember when AMD first started to release decent processors (later k6-2 days) and Intel prices began dropping to compensate. Even if you don't like AMD and ATIs products we need both of then to keep prices down and provide the motivation needed for intel and nvidia to continue their pace of innovation. Competition like this is a benefit to all consumers and I don't see anyone in the wings waiting that are able to be the new AMD and ATI. Plus I think the anyone that arbitrarily chooses one brand over the over is a tard. For price vs. performance (depending on how much money you wanted to spend) AMD, until recently, has been as good if not better then intel. Same with nvidia and ATI. Hopefully they pull through.

...we could all start using SPARCs. ;)

Goodwill = The premium that you paid for a comapny above the net value of it's assets. Impairment of the goodwill means that AMD is writing down the value of ATI

I still miss any clue now, retrospectively, why AMD bought ATI in the first place. Was it just a misguided, expensive, idea ?

When they did it, I was so very sure to see an eco-system coming up, supporting e.g. Free and Open Source. Everyone knows that the 'alternative' people had a tendency to prefer AMD / ATI to Intel / Nvidia. Now the last card I can't run with DRI on my systems is from ATI. No, not even with a binary blob. Intel beat them to a free driver !

And where is all that synergy; the single-chip implementation of graphics on the same wafer as CPU (or vice versa) ? 17 months ago I could buy a Sempron classified 35W, now my Semprons will be in the 45W class; and without graphics included. Where is the progress ?

I don't feel like blaming AMD on the mess with Barcelona. They couldn't know. But at buying ATI they should have known better about the other 2 items mentioned above. Looks like they took the liberty and decide blindly, doesn't it !

I never was a fan of ATI and it seems like they were already losing major ground to nvidia when AMD bought them. That was the worst buy AMD ever made. I think they payed way too much not to mention they simply had no business buying ATI. It was a hardship fore them at that time and I don't think has ever helped since.

ATI hasn't had a chance since they're just the sidekick of a processor company.

AMD should cut em loose...light a fire under them and see what happens. I bet they would kick it in gear even with the huge advantages nvidia now has.

AMD seems to have gone through a period of intelism. I got mad at intel way back when, after they started changing cpu sockets every 6 months. It was too expensive to upgrade when you had to continually change the mb as well. Now AMD has been doing that somewhat recently....I read that sockets 754 and 939 were going to be it for awhile so we purchased a bunch of those. Then they cut 754 and intro'd am1 which was here for a month then am2. Wasn't there am+ as well???...etc..etc...

while I do agree with you about the whole debacle with the 754/939 platforms, AMD's new socket AM2+ will be compatible with older AM2 boards. You just won't be able to take advantage of the some of the feature like hypertransport 3.0 and such. Also supposidely AM3 procs will work in AM2+ boards.

"Fuck AMD and fuck other products that create a larger than necessary market."

And fuck bourgeois capitalistic competitive attitudes, comrade!!!