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Well to defend them they needed a solution to fight the incoming intel cpu with integrated gpu. They needed ATI portfolio and knowledges.
by yulaow 10y ago
Well to defend them they needed a solution to fight the incoming intel cpu with integrated gpu. They needed ATI portfolio and knowledges.
- monocasa 10y agoYeah, exactly. If they didn't have their APUs, they wouldn't have hardly anything anymore.
- byuu 10y agoThe integrated GPU really didn't need that kind of power, though. Anyone playing more than solitaire is going to get a discrete GPU anyway. They could have snapped up a smaller chipset maker for a tenth of the price. Instead they entered both the integrated and discrete GPU markets, when they were already a market underdog that already struggled in the CPU market. They paid way too much for ATI, and then spread themselves way too thin. I'm not just pointing out the error in hindsight, I was a critic of this deal back when it was first announced as well.
- pcwalton 10y ago> Anyone playing more than solitaire is going to get a discrete GPU anyway That's not true. The PC enthusiast market is a small segment of the overall PC market, and that's not even counting mobiles. Lots of people play non-graphically-intensive games. More importantly, GPUs are hugely important for things that aren't games. Honestly, the fact that video needs hardware acceleration (which is part of the media/GPU block) means that there's a reasonable argument that games aren't even the most important practical function of a GPU.
- gcp 10y agoCurrent Intel iGPU, and especially AMD APUs are powerful enough to play all the most popular esports games, despite them being quite a bit more demanding than solitaire.