Forbes is reporting on escalating rumors that AMD is in talks to purchase graphics card manufacturer ATI. The rumors originate from analyst Apjit Walia, published by RBC Capital Markets. These rumors do seem to be carrying some weight in the stock market, with ATI jumping as news leaked out. According to the report, the “...synergies of [the buyout] seem consistent with the recent announcements by AMD to significantly increase capacity over the next few-years.” This would certainly shake up the PC and gaming playfield, with ATI having moved into the motherboard chipset race lately, and their development of the competing SLI technology, Crossfire. Intel has been largely trounced in the gaming arena, but is looking to catch up with the release of their Core processors for the desktop, and AMD should see higher competition there. With a AMD buyout of ATI, suddenly the processor manufacturer would have solutions available to address low-end integrated graphics chipsets to high-end GPU offerings, and could further tune their motherboards towards gaming performance. nVidia grabbed a lot of hard core gaming enthusiast mindshare when they released SLI; an AMD-ATI merger could to a lot to capture credibility in that community.

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