14 DAY TRIAL // The news that AMD was going to buy up ATI came and went, and left the Apple scene pretty much unchanged, except for vague speculation that Nvidia was now the name on graphic cards inside Macs. When one of the two biggest names in the CPU industry buys one of the two biggest names in the GPU industry, the remaining two must follow was the reasoning.
The very same rumor made rounds on Wall Street, causing Nvidia's stock price to jump $2.32 and stock trades to double in volume on average, however an announcement failed to come. With Nvidia's market capitalization at almost $11 billion, it is a tougher acquisition than ATI, for which AMD paid $5.4 billion. However, unlike AMD that has no graphics technology when it announced its plans to buy ATI, Intel does, already being the world's biggest supplier of graphics chips. This fact is one of the main reasons why the rumor of the Nvidia acquiring simply does not hold water, AMD needed a workable platform strategy, and that was their reason for buying ATI, but Intel has that already.
While some may say that Intel needs Nvidia because its latest effort, the GMA X3000, has not proved out to be all they hoped for, this might very well not be the case as Intel recently renewed its alliance with UK-based graphics technology developer Imagination Technologies, pumping almost $10m into the company.