A former AMD employee shared an interesting secret that happened in the early 2000s when the company was negotiating to buy NVIDIA. At that time, AMD only had Intel as a competitor, as it had not yet bought ATi and therefore did not market its own graphics solutions.

Those of you who read us daily will already know that NVIDIA had a hard time in the late 1990s when they tried to put one of their GPUs into the Dreamcast, SEGA’s famous and (unfairly) maligned console. In the end, he managed to recover, and in this case, the purchase attempt was not motivated by the bad situation at NVIDIA, but rather AMD was simply interested to enter the GPU market upon acquisition of said company.

The two companies came to discuss a possible purchase of NVIDIA by AMD, but in the end it did not happen because Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, set a condition of the sale and was not willing to back down: was to be CEO of the resulting joint venture of this purchase operation. At the time, this was unacceptable to AMD and the negotiations ended.

It’s clear that if AMD bought NVIDIA, the world we know would be completely different. We think it would lead to the merger of two companies that are one of the most important in the technology sector today, namely NVIDIA’s market cap is $3.10 trillion, a figure that far exceeds the $277.84 billion that AMD registers in market capitalization.

AMD didn’t buy NVIDIA, they bought ATi

And we already know that it was ultimately a success on AMD’s part, because allowed him to enter the GPU business and diversify its business units. As a result of this operation, APUs were born, a series of accelerated processing units that integrate CPU and GPU in the same package. It is these types of solutions that have given life to almost all consoles of the last two generations, including such popular models as the PS4 and PS5.

A former AMD employee also explained They didn’t get the support and recognition they deserved, while Intel took all the credit for being late to the 64-bit race and using multi-core “glued” chip designs like the Pentium D or Core 2 Quad.

It’s true that AMD had a lot of fun with those two generations of processors. Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 better Intel… because it was Intel! AMD eventually failed to capitalize on this advantage, Intel woke up with the Conroe architecture, and the rest is history.

AI generated cover image.