Four years after the AMD acquisition and several profitable quarters later, it seems saddening to see the company finally axing the ATI brand later this year in favor of a much more simpler moniker.

Save those boxes guys, soon you won’t see an ATI logo on any product sold in the market.

The motivation behind the decision to retire the ATI brand comes from AMD’s own internal research. Too bad AMD isn’t privy on sharing the details of this research, just the three major findings from it:

1) AMD brand preference triples when the person surveyed is aware of the ATI-AMD merger.
2) The AMD brand is viewed as stronger than ATI when compared to graphics competitors (presumably NVIDIA).
3) The Radeon and Fire Pro brands themselves (without ATI being attached to them) are very high as is.

We can however, speculate a few of the reasons for shedding the famous GPU title now is marketshare: One is marketshare. According to the latest Mercury research data, AMD has overtaken NVIDIA in terms of the discrete GPU market. In conjunction with this, the company is also is readying its first Fusion-based processors that mate CPU and GPU cores on a single die, which is probably AMD felt it was the right time to shed the ATI brand name.

While all currently available models will retain the ATI branding, all GPUs to be released forth by AMD will no longer carry them. Instead, you have to look for something similar to what’s embedded below when making your next AMD GPU purchase:

Is anyone else going to miss the ATI moniker? I know I will.

source AnandTech

Posted by sylv3rblade on Monday, 30 Aug 2010 12:01:PM. Filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry