AMD announced this week that they are going to retire the ATI name from its graphics cards range. The change will come into effect at the end of the year. AMD purchased ATI 5 years ago for $5.4 billion. The reason was to gain traction in the graphics and chipset markets which have been dominated by Intel and NVIDIA.
AMD believe that ATI is no longer needed to convince users to purchase ATI graphics cards and that AMD has a better brand value. Also AMD has had to market 2 brands and will only be marketing one which will significantly reduce marketing budgets. At the moment ATI have 2 brand ranges available to the public, namely the Radeon and FirePro.
The new graphics cards will be featuring AMD as the manufacturer as existing product will continue to feature ATI.