Advanced Micro Devices Inc (NYSE : AMD) completed its $5.4 billion acquisition of ATI today which was originally announced July 24, 2006.  Now that the deal is done work can be done on building new projects.  Thus it only makes sense to announce something.  The first products to be released in 2008 are being called ‘Fusion’ technology.  I imagine that this will basically be a combination of a CPU and a graphics card on one chip.  Most likely, this new technology will find its way into a mobile solutions, although there is probably still a market for them with desktops similar to systems with onboard graphics cards.  They have also mentioned that this new technology will in no way prevent users from using discrete high-end video cards, good news if you are an NVIDIA fan.

After the 112 days since the original announcement, I still don’t know if this deal is going to help AMD win the race against Intel.  This kind of investment into a graphics card company will pay dividends in the short-term with the purchase of new technology and the acquisition of qualified technical staff.  In the long term, I believe that this is just going to help AMD catch up to the level that Intel is already at.  This deal will not be giving AMD any sort of competitive advantage as Intel can continue its development into their on-board graphics solutions.  The big winner from everything is going to be NVIDIA, they will continue to control the graphics card market on Intel systems, with even less competition now.