Looks like the side effects of the AMD-ATI merger are already taking the limelight of several motherboard and graphics specialized manufacturers, according to the vice president of Sapphire Technologies, who stated that the take over will be favorable only for ATI's large partners, as the little ones will almost certainly perish.

"The AMD-ATI deal is excellent as far as Sapphire is concerned. The strong ATI partners will survive and it may well lead to some of the smaller players exiting the market. ATI has 16 partners and probably only needs five," said Adrian Thompson, vice president of marketing for Sapphire Technologies, in an interview with ITP.net web-site, cited by X-bit Labs.

But the leaders also might suffer from this sudden move, as, earlier this month, it has been reported that ATI refused to produce chipsets for Intel, but didn't mention the reason for this decision. The company signed an agreement with Intel and the graphics developer had to produce several chipsets for Intel's microprocessors which were scheduled for release in 2007.

Even if the reasons haven't been disclosed up until now, the ATI-AMD merger might be to blame for the unclosed deal. Moreover, as ATI will be part of AMD by the end of 2007, and because Intel requests a separate license for every new speed-bin of its microprocessor system bus, AMD, the latter's challenger, might not want to close a deal with its adversary.