[qb45]

> Paid too much for ATI: Bought them for 5.4 billion in 2006 when they could have waited till 2008 and bought them for 1 billion :) They had to write off most of the ATI value off their books and took charge for it.

But was it really that predictable back in 2006?

2008 sounds like the year when Intel killed 3rd party chipset market. Which, afaik, wasn't expected by anyone.

[FreakyT]

Ah, that was the year that happened? I still remember the dark ages of having to pick between one of several chipset manufacturers, each with their own sets of strange problems.

Really, I think moving to chipsets made by the CPU manufacturer was an overall improvement.

[qb45]

A part of those chip's appeal was integrated GPUs. Not everyone wanted to buy discrete GPUs and Intel's own IGPs of early '00s were rather poor.

[amiraliakbari]

> Intel killed 3rd party chipset market

Can you explain on this? By producing chipsets itself/any specific product?

[sspiff]

They stopped licensing the interfaces used to connect to the different parts together (north bridge <-> south bridge and north bridge <-> CPU) starting with Nehalem (first generation of Core i[N] processors).

This effectively meant that if you wanted to build a mainboard for Intel CPU's, you had to buy the chipsets from Intel as well.

Before that, you could buy mainboards with ATI (Xpress), nVidia (nForce), or VIA chipsets. All of these could integrate different SATA contollers, audio chips, USB busses, etc.

By not licensing their interfaces, Intel basically took over almost all of that market by locking others out of it. I believe they could only do this because they had no real competition from AMD anymore in the CPU market.