AMD announced their merger with ATI a couple of months ago and the merger should be completed in this quarter, with a shareholder meeting on Friday October 13th to vote on the merger. Today, AMD is a large corporation with the second largest CPU market share, to Intel. AMD has recently made a move into Dell computers for the first time, and it should be interesting to see what the combination of AMD+ATI will do for computing.
ATI released the Xpress 3200 chipset earlier this year to support two PCI Express x16 lanes in Crossfire mode. They also released a new South Bridge, the SB600 to improve USB performance. ASUS is the number one motherboard company in the world in terms of numbers of motherboards sold, with over a third of all motherboards sold in 2005 being manufactured by ASUS. ASUS manufactures a wide variety of computer related products, including video cards, motherboards, mini-systems, optical drives and more. Their motherboards are known for their extra features and quality. The board on the test bench today is the ASUS M2R32-MVP, based upon ATI's Xpress 3200 chipset.
