Chip manufacturer claims ATI acquisition will bring more opportunities to its partners

AMD has hinted at its desire to strengthen channel partnerships and smash what it claims is the “Intel monopoly”, following its acquisition of graphics card giant ATI.

At revealed by CRN Online last week, the two firms claimed the deal, which saw AMD buy ATI for $5.4bn, would give it the foundations to challenge Intel’s dominance. AMD and Intel have been locked in legal wranglings over alleged antitrust issues for more than a decade.

Thomas McCoy, chief administrative officer at AMD, said: “The strength of AMD is distribution, and we will not be moving away from this.

“It is a shame we do not have more tier two/three OEM partners in Europe to be more competitive. One of the advantages of breaking the monopoly is it will bring a lot more opportunity [for partners]. This acquisition gives us a great set of building blocks for innovation and a competitive capability against Intel.”

An Intel representative told CRN that the firm is “evaluating the acquisition” and “could not make any comment at the present time”.

Peter Edinger, vice-president of EMEA at ATI, said: “We will have two sets of distributors combined, which means bigger market penetration.”

AMD and ATI insisted that relationships with rivals Intel and nVidia will continue, claiming it “makes sense to support the competition”.

However, Gordon Davies, managing director of integrator Compusys Consulting, said sharing technology plans between the rival firms might not last beyond the current product roadmap.

“Developers might not be so happy to share future technology plans with their rival, so it will be interesting to see what happens,” he said. “But this is a big technology leap for AMD which could drive leadership back to it.”

Claudette Atkinson, general manager of PC Components at Computer 2000, said: “We are in a unique position because we supply Intel and AMD and we can take advantage of both. We are looking to strengthen all our lines and would want to be involved in any initiative to get AMD market share back.”