Graphic Death: AMD Kills ATI Brand

As tech stories go, it doesn't have the sexiness of a potential showdown between Apple and Facebook over the "Face" trademark, or the epic boardroom intrigue of the bidding war over 3Par. Yet, news of the retirement of the ATI brand is reason to give any true computer geek pause.
It also reassess an interesting conundrum for Apple about cross-branding in a post-ATI brand future.

As rumored, chipmaker AMD will indeed shed, by the end of 2010, the ATI badge from all its products. AMD announced on its blog that the ATI brand will be no more. Established in 1985, ATI grew to become one of the world's most successful suppliers of graphics chips. It was purchased by AMD in 2007. The dropping of the ATI brand comes after research showed the ATI brand was weaker than the AMD one.


While the ATI brand will be retired (including as the name associated with AMD's Twitter feed) its products will simply continue under the parent AMD brand. Bloomberg Businessweek points out one detail of the brand retirement that could raise a serious branding problem: "Apple uses the ATI graphics in the iMac, with the ATI logo prominently displayed on Apple's website. The logo would instead reflect AMD, which could help expand the company's visibility."
The issue is that Apple uses AMD competitor Intel's chip sets. Apple products boasting both AMD and Intel logos could be confusing. Apple will certainly have to find a way to address this challenge.

However the biggest loser will be the branded graphics tech flame-war. Like with Apple vs. Microsoft and AMD vs. Intel, ATI played one half of a classic branded tech feud with rival graphics chip brand Nvidia (see above commercial). With the ATI name dead, so dies an epic battle between brand names.