The AMD, Advanced Micro Devices, and ATI, Array Technologies Incorporated, merger has finally been confirmed.

Now, in the enthusiast community there has been quite some discussion on this merger from the first day it was rumoured. Whether AMD plans on using ATI's expertise in producing motherboards and GPUs is unknown. It would seem obvious that AMD plans on setting up in house motherboard production -- probably keeping it under the ATI name -- as competition is lacking in this sector. The only significant competitor to the enthusiast market being nVidia, whilst Via provide competition for the mainstream OEMs.

However, many in the enthusiast community are, seemingly, worried that this merger may lead to less choice. With ATI being the only competitor to nVidia in the high-end GPU department; similarly, ATI and nVidia are competitors in producing high-end motherboard chipsets. Realising this, they are assuming that nVidia will stop producing the nForce chipset that has been dominant in the enthusiast market for AMD systems. Whilst, it is assumed, that ATI GPUs may gain advantages on the AMD platform; therefore, reducing the enthusiast's choices to just two -- Intel/nVidia, or AMD/ATI.

Nevertheless, such a situation should not worry us in the short term, by short term I mean after K8L. As the merger won't change anything running on AM2, after all nForce chipsets and GeForce cards are already available. There is currently no reason for nVidia to stop developing these products for AMD systems, there is too much profit to be had. Furthermore, unless AMD make significant changes to their future chip -- K8L -- then the merger should have little effect on nVidia supporting it. Especially with the image, and prestige, their motherboards currently have in the enthusiast market.

We need only to be concerned with the long term future -- that beyond K8L. AMD's plans for what happens then are unknown, and we can only speculate. It is plausible that AMD might incorporate graphics, or aspects of graphics onto the processor; which, may leave the GPU redundant. However, it is entirely likely that such a system may only be designed for the budget end of systems; leaving us with almost the same choice we have today.