Will AMD be bought by Nvidia?

A serious blunder during the launch of the new Puma notebook chipset – AMD's answer to Intel's Centrino platform – could be the end of the ailing processor vendor. This, at least, is the opinion of analyst Doug Freedman of Technology Business Research in the US. Freedman thinks that graphics chip manufacturer Nvidia could buy AMD, eliminating its competitor ATI in the process. ATI has been part of AMD since 2006 and has considerably disturbed the CPU giant's financial reports ever since.

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Both AMD and Intel are working on integrating CPUs and graphics components in one chip, says Freedman. AMD's PowerXPress technology with switchable graphics engines (an energy-saving engine for mobile battery operation and a more powerful one for mains operation) should also be of interest to Nvidia, and by buying AMD, the vendor could improve its position towards Intel.

AMD has been struggling with financial, technical and project management problems for many months, most recently with the launch of its "Barcelona" quadcore processor core, which was announced in autumn 2006 but is now only scheduled for release this spring. In January there were rumours that IBM is interested in buying AMD, but they were instantly and vehemently denied by both IBM and AMD. A potential buyer might not even automatically acquire the licence for building x86 compatible processors that Intel once awarded to AMD.

(jbe)