iwillburnbush said:
I guess it could be the other way around too though. Maybe ATI realised that they wouldn't be able to get their top of the line cards out in reasonable quantaties and prices and so they decided to put their money into their competitor instead of their own product line in an effort to turn a profit with minimal up-front cost and put that profit towards their next products so that they can beat Nvidia. Although according to Black_Paladin's post, ATI would be screwed up the a$$...
Yes, ATI would be screwed up indeed. Besides, whenever you see a company that is putting their money into their competitors products, you know that something is not right within that company. It's pretty funny actually because you can compare this to a race car driver who is betting all his money on his main competitor (imagine Aryton Senna betting all his money on Allen Prost for a race!
) or even worse, imagine RIAA buying 17% of a file sharing network where people are trading MP3s!!!
There is something even worse than that however. Imagine Bush financing Fahrenheit 911 (in the hope s that it will make a big hit and he will get his share from it), LMAO!
Anyway, I believe that ATI executives should be spending their money on their own line of products rather than hoping to make a profit off of their competitors products. I suppose this says much about the sucess of ATI's current generation (or maybe even next generation) cards. After all, if ATI was doing really good, there would really be no reason to try gambling on its competitors products as it would be cheaper and more logical to concentrate on R&D for ATI's own line of products. As I said in my earlier post, 17% is a tremendous amount and it must have been very expensive for ATI to acquire this amount (even with the nVidia stock being at an alltime low currently).
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and there is a very good reason for ATI to own a huge percentage of nVidia. The fact that I can't think of any good reasons doesn't mean there are no good reasons.