Thursday December 14 AMD held their last Analyst Day for the year of 2006. This event was held so AMD could catch up with market analysts and give an update of their recent happenings. It also was held to provide an outline of AMD’s future and give an idea of the kind of products we will be seeing introduced from the company.

Last June AMD held a memorable Analyst Day in which they outlined their future for 2007. They released details about their future Quad core architecture, introduced a new roadmap which included Quad FX processors, at that time known as 4x4, and also announced their new Torrenza platform.

The Analyst Day held yesterday, December 14, showed a very new future for AMD. The first Analyst Day held after the acquisition of ATI, which was completed in October, the event combined both the futures of AMD and ATI. The event discussed future technologies that will be introduced by AMD and ATI. In particular, AMD shed some more light on their Fusion technology which combines both the CPU and GPU into one chip.

We begin our article with an analysis of the new business structure of AMD that was made as a result of the acquisition of ATI.

AMD has significantly reorganized their internal operations. The company now has three major divisions: processors (CPU), graphics processing units (GPU), and consumer electronics (CE). The divisions are synchronous with each other in marketing, research, and product development.

Ever since the acquisition of ATI by AMD, the future of the ATI brand has been unsure. The event last Thursday clarified the branding aspect of the relationship between AMD and ATI. The branding of products has been split into product families. The ATI Brand will continue to be used for the PC GPU segment along with the Game Console segment, such as for the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. Chipsets designed for Intel processors will continue to bear the name of ATI, a wise move on AMD’s part, while chipsets for AMD processors will be branded with the AMD name. As can be expected, the processor segment for AMD will remain untouched. The same cannot be said for the consumer electronics segment as all products previously commercialized as ATI will now adopt the AMD name.

To summarize the above, the ATI brand will continue to exist in the GPU segment of AMD products. The ATI brand will also be used for Intel chipsets, a product segment in which the use of the AMD name would create potential problems.