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I would argue it was the worst decision they could have made. There was a ton of talk in the press that they overvalued ATi at 2-3x it's actual valuation ($5.4b
by deaddodo 8y ago
I would argue it was the worst decision they could have made. There was a ton of talk in the press that they overvalued ATi at 2-3x it's actual valuation ($5.4b), forcing them to take on a hefty debt. It also directly led to the sale of Spansion (which is now part of Cypress Semiconductor and valued at 4.5x it's sale value) and Imageon (after they purchased ATi, which became Qualcomm's Adreno) literally right before both of those markets skyrocketed.
On top of that, Nvidia was valued at much less than ATi at the time and was willing to sell to AMD, given the requirement that Jensen Huang be the CEO of the new combined company. A competent CEO was exactly what AMD needed at that time, given their turnover of three inadequate CEO's previous to Lisa Su. And Huang has proven to be quite competent [1].
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nvda
- hajile 8y agoAMD's biggest mistake by an order of magnitude was betting everything on CMT only to find out it was a bust, but they were stuck pumping out variants for the next 7 years.
- robotbikes 8y agoFor anyone wondering what CMT stands for, it is Clustered Multi Threading which was used before Zen. Evidently it wasn't as effective as SMT. I wasn't aware but this link has a brief explanation. (https://www.quora.com/How-are-physical-cores-in-AMD-better-than-Intels-hyperthreading-for-gaming https://www.quora.com/How-are-physical-cores-in-AMD-better-t...)
- deaddodo 8y agoWhich can be directly attributed to Dirk Meyer’s personal and technical team leadership. I highly doubt Jensen would have pursued the same course. I’m not an Nvidia evangelist or anything, but one has proven results and the other only has failure after failure under their belt.