Markham (ip-192.com): It has been a long "Goodbye" but now it's official: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will retire the ATI brand. AMD acquired the major Canadian designer and supplier of graphics processing units and motherboard chipsets in 2006. As a fabless semiconductor company, ATI specializes in the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry. Its main competitor is NVIDIA in the graphics and handheld market.
ATI was founded in 1985 as Array Technologies Incorporated by Lee Ka Lau, Benny Lau and Kwok Yuen Ho. The company started by producing integrated graphics cards for PC manufacturers such as IBM and Commodore. In May 1991, the company released the Mach8, ATI's first product able to process graphics without the computers CPU. ATI Technologies Inc. went public in 1993 with stock listed at NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchange. The Markham, Ontario based company made an entrance into the mobile computing sector by introducing 3D-graphics acceleration to laptops in 1996. The ATI Radeon line of graphics products was unveiled in 2000. On July 24, 2006, AMD and ATI announced a plan to merge together in a deal valued at $5.4 billion. ATI retained its name, logos and trademarks.
AMD announced that future ATI products will bear the AMD Radeon logo. "We want to simplify the buying experience. We'll complete this within a year and that is giving it a lot more time than it would require," AMD said in a statement. The move is expected to help AMD to consolidate its branding. AMD said that by 2011 its product lineup will include the Opteron server processors, consumer oriented processors sold under the Vision brand, and Radeon/FirePro graphic processors.
The picture shows the former ATI headquarter in Markham. Photo: Raysonho/Public Domain
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