AMD/ATI, and the Need to Change

Welcome to the future!

We’ve been waiting for this news ever since AMD bought ATI, but AMD today revealed that we probably won’t see the ATI name in 2011, though we’ll likely hear it for years to come.

The news isn’t a great surprise – we reported back in 2006 that the ATI brand would be retired after AMD had bought the company, and the situation has been a touch confusing ever since. Should we say that we’re reviewing and AMD Radeon HD 5000-series card or an ATI one, for example?

AMD itself has also been confused as to how to present its two sides. If you want a driver update for an ATI Radeon graphics card, AMD would have you visit game.amd.com, despite AMD’s home site having a ‘Download Drivers’ section. That home site used to insist that you had to select either the ATI or AMD division to find your information, though at least that’s been fixed now. The situation was almost as confusing as having a single editorial staff produce a magazine and website with totally different names. [Ed – Ahem!]

“We have ‘permission’ to consolidate under the AMD brand”

During the first half of our AMD briefing we’ll admit to having an emotional response – not quite a ‘how dare they’ moment, but hardly a reaction that Spock would approve of. AMD was clearly concerned about this, and much of its briefing focused how the decision to retire the ATI brand was arrived at. John Volkman, AMD Corporate Marketing Fellow, started by re-iterating that ‘AMD takes pride in simplifying the buying process’, a theme we first saw from AMD when we took a first look at its Vision laptops and branding approach.

The survey and graph clearly show that the ATI brand needs to go. Apparently. Click to enlarge

Volkman continued, ‘We [AMD] had the opportunity to lay the ATI brand to rest [when we took it over], but chose not to do that’ he elaborated because the company felt it didn’t have ‘permission’ to do so. For a while AMD has clearly been pondering the move, and has been surveying ‘discrete graphics aware’ customers (people who have bought a graphics card or a PC with a discrete graphics card) from the US, UK, Germany, China, Japan, Brazil and Russia about the AMD and ATI brands.

Volkman said that from this survey earlier this year AMD had ‘learned the Radeon and ATI brands were equally strong when considering graphics’ and that ‘AMD and Radeon was stronger than ATI and Radeon’. That’s a rather surprising result for us, as it indicates that these ‘discrete graphics aware’ people are more comfortable with the idea of an AMD Radeon graphics card than an ATI Radeon graphics card.

Keeping the ATI brand in the Fusion APU era would have been horribly confusing. Click to enlarge.

AMD also claimed that the survey results indicated that the AMD brand was stronger than ATI versus ‘graphics competitors’, another surprising result for us. When pressed on what kind of questions the survey contained, Volkman responded that it was filled with ‘straightforward brand consideration questions – a standard battery of questions [such as] are you aware of this brand, would you consider that brand.’

The decision to drop the ATI brand sounded a touch over-justified, with this survey of knowledgeable customers and even graphs to back up the conclusion. However, when we thought about the move in more detail, it’s perfectly sensible for AMD to want to have clear branding for the future. Imagine the confusion over a single AMD Fusion APU that has ATI Radeon graphics – is that one chip made by one company or two made by two distinct ones? We look at the new, clearer logos and branding on the next page.

New AMD Radeon Logos and Branding

AMD wants to move toward having as few logos as possible, but this isn’t an easy task. Fundamentally it wants to have two brands: Vision for systems and Radeon for graphics. However, this is slightly disingenuous, as there are already five sub-brands in the Vision family – a vanilla, Premium, Ultimate, Black and Pro. Worse still, while the first three of that list are a nice red logo, the Vision Black logo is a murky olive green and the Vision Pro logo is a lighter green.

AMD promises a very simple branding scheme by ditching the ATI portion. Click to enlarge

The claim from AMD is that we’ll only have two logos for its newly named graphics division, Radeon for gaming-class graphics cards and FirePro for its professional cards. Volkman also said that OEMs (system builders) wanted a transitional period, so there are actually two sets of these logos, one with ‘Graphics’ across the bottom and one with the AMD brand – OEMs are free to use whichever they want, though Volkman belieived most would start with the ‘Graphics’ ones and move to the fully AMD ones. He predicted that the transition would be complete within a year, though admitted he saw the change happening much quicker.

There will be two types of logo at the start, with OEMs free to choose whichever they want- the aim is to transition from the lower logos to upper within a year. Click to enlarge.

When asked whether we’d see a similar breakdown of the Radeon brand to fit price-to-performance ranges, Volkman evaded the question. We’re fairly confident that we’ll see a continuation of the Vision logos with the Radeons – with Black for enthusiast-level cards, Premium for the next step down and so on. The interesting part will be whether AMD bothers to make a GPU for a low-end discrete card considering that it’ll have Fusion APUs (CPUs with ‘Radeon-class’ GPUs integrated).

Volkman did say that ‘APUs will be branded Visions’ and that a system with an AMD CPU or APU will be branded Vision. If a system has a CPU from another manufacturer (no guesses who that is) but has a Radeon graphics card, you’ll see a Radeon logo sticker. Interestingly, we’ll never see the Fusion logo on a PC or laptop – that’s reserved for being a ‘sell-in brand, a brand for the industry to use’.

The new logos in action. Click to enlarge.

We can see the aim of the re-branding exercise, to cut the confusion between AMD and its graphics division ATI, and the logo scheme should deliver on this. AMD will keep the Radeon brand too, so it’s not like it’s throwing all those years of history and heritage in the bin.

It’s over to you now – do you think AMD’s strategy will make buying PC hardware more straightforward? Do you mourn the loss of the ATI name or are you happy to see that Radeon will live on?

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Written by :

DirtyDave