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AMD has announced that it is retiring the ATI brand four years after the chipmaker acquired the graphics hardware company.
Having operated the ATI brand since the $5.4 billion takeover in 2006, graphics card and chipset products continued to be sold under the ATI banner with Radeon and FirePro in the consumer and professional categories respectively. Now the company is set to drop the ATI brand ahead of the launch of upcoming integrated the Fusion GPU/CPU range.
In the intervening period ATI’s activities outside of graphics cards has either been absorbed by AMD, such as the chipset business, or sold off such as the TV business. With the company continuing to perform well in notebook discreet graphics, AMD’s move will also include a simplification of PC brands across the range.
The days of logos with obscure stickers of strangely named AMD CPUs are over with the Intel-rival instead moving to the AMD Vision which will be generic across all products with AMD processors. The AMD Radeon logo will appear seperately if this is included and AMD even unveiled Radeon branding logos without the ‘AMD’, apparently targetted towards systems which may have Intel processors.
"The rebranding from ATI to AMD has been an option since AMD and ATI first came together as one company four years ago. Based on market research and feedback from our partners, the time is right to fully consolidate the company under the AMD brand," said AMD Australia & NZ country manager Brian Slattery.
"We believe strongly, based on our research, that replacing ATI with AMD will be beneficial to strengthening the AMD brand and that associating AMD with the product and technology brands of Radeon, FirePro, Eyefinity and others has a net positive effect."
Anandtechhas AMD marketing slides which describe the new brand strategy in detail.
