AMD Considered Merger With Nvidia Before Its Acquisition Of ATI

An interesting report from Forbes suggests that according to former AMD employees, the company originally approached NVIDIA before buying its rival ATI in 2006. AMD CEO Hector Ruiz was apparently confident that they could overtake rival Intel, by jumping into the graphics processing market. The idea even back then was to fuse a CPU with a GPU, creating what we know today as AMD’s APU; with this idea AMD hoped to deliver a product Intel at the time couldn’t offer. As it turns out NVIDIA was AMD’s first choice, which makes sense as at the time AMD and Nvidia had relatively good relations, with NVIDIA also having a significant market share on AMD motherboard chipsets. The talks broke down however, when Jen-Hsun Huang CEO of NVIDIA, insisted on being CEO of the combined companies. Ruiz was most likely not impressed by this and decided instead to acquire ATI. Unlucky for AMD at the time, they soon ran into stiff competition due to NVIDIA’s aggressive release of strong products, which caused a shift in market share in NVIDIA’s favor. All the while AMD was continuing to struggle in its efforts to integrate their newly acquired graphics division into the company. Since that time AMD has continued to fight its way back into prominence with its lineup of CPUs, GPUs and now APUs, while NVIDIA has agressively moved into the market for mobile processors with its Tegra line. Things could be extremely different today had AMD and NVIDIA merged, what would it be like if they had?