Driver Heaven: Will the merger limit customer choice?
At the moment we can get Crossfire for AMD (CF3200) and Intel (I975)... Many people fear that AMD will "force" them into buying AMD processors if they want to run ATI graphics cards.

Jon Carvill: This merger is about growth, innovation and choice for our customers. AMD is committed to an approach of delivering open platforms where customers can choose the right solution to meet their unique needs. We’re also committed to delivering market-leading products that provide the highest levels of performance, power efficiency and scalability. As part of that model we have to give customers the ability to choose – whether that be a unified platform or best-of-breed solution.

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Driver Heaven: The merger will obviously have an impact on future chipset, graphics and CPU development ...do you have any initial feelings on how the merger will affect ATI's current work on game physics via a 3rd GPU?

Jon Carvill: This merger has no impact on ATI’s current activities for GPU physics. With open innovation platforms like “Torrenza” we have a very complimentary approach to enable specialized media processing within our architecture.

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Driver Heaven: Is the long term strategy to operate as one company or two? For example, will gfx still continue to be designed in ATI's existing facilities and CPU's on AMD's or should we expect to see a merging of engineers/designers where everyone provides expertise on forthcoming products?

Jon Carvill: The merged company will operate as AMD once the transaction close. ATI will continue to manufacture its graphics processors with TSMC and UMC. AMD is very comfortable with a hybrid approach to manufacturing as evidenced by our recent success in ramping microprocessor production at Chartered Semiconductor. Certainly, we anticipate that this merger will present new and exciting ways for our engineers to collaborate in areas like mobile, commercial, digital media and emerging markets.

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Driver Heaven: CPU/GPU convergence: do you see this as a necessity?
- If so, do you see budget GPUs embedded into CPUs first, with high-end following?

Jon Carvill: The market for both discrete and integrated graphics continues to be strong and complimentary to one another. When you look at markets like mobile and commercial you see increased benefits in highly integrated CPU and GPU platforms to deliver the best performance-per-watt proposition. In the enthusiast market it’s a much different approach with the focus on breakneck performance and upgrade ability.

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Driver Heaven: Is the graphic card as we know it nearing its end?

Jon Carvill: We believe discrete graphics continues to remain a strong and viable market. We expect GPU innovation to continue moving forward and deliver new levels of performance, immersion and realism on PC and consumer platforms.

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Driver Heaven: - Is ATI going to retain its logos/product names for future products?

Jon Carvill: It would premature to speculate on this right now. Once the transaction closes in Q4 2006 we should have more to tell you about the branding strategy.

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Driver Heaven: - Are any roadmaps of both companies in the short term future affected by this merger?

Jon Carvill: In the short term we expect no changes in the roadmaps for either company. In 2007, we will begin to deliver new and open customer-centric platforms targeted at key market segments.

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Driver Heaven: Will the merger impact the expected delivery schedule/time to market of the R600?

Jon Carvill: You would have to ask a representative from ATI on the time-to-market for R600. It’s our intent for this merger not to have any adverse impact on product delivery for either company.

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Driver Heaven: - Where do you see AMD/ATI gaining strength by this deal? Any potential losses by it?

Jon Carvill: We plan to promote our complementary business strengths, including industry-leading products, technologies, manufacturing leadership, geographic strengths, and customer and partner base. In the near term, 2007, we should be able to deliver new customer-centric, open platforms for key market segments faster than either company could have done alone. Today we both have “go-to-market” strategies. By putting them together, because we have such complementary strengths, we believe we will create an “accelerate-to-market” strategy to allow us to deliver in 2007 products that will bring very specific value to customers in key segments like commercial and mobile markets. We will aim to transform processing technology with general-purpose, media-centric, data-centric and graphic-centric open platforms, to re-engineer the future, in 2008 and beyond.